Skateboarding feels like a kind of sacred territory for the trio of young men in Minding the Gap, territory that's eroding as life pulls them in different directions. But those things can briefly be outrun, creating a feeling of sanctuary, and solidarity. It's not that unhappy home lives, racism, loneliness, economic precariousness, or sexism vanish when someone gets on a board.
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Skating is also a perfect visualization of that particular feeling of freedom that is the privilege of being young - not free from responsibilities or realities, but able to set them aside more easily, at least for a little while, to act like both the streets and the world are yours to navigate, all paths still open. ("No, bro, I'm a poser," a Skate Kitchen character drawls when someone spots her board and asks if she can do an ollie. But it goes deeper than that, to a scene that's an unpredictable nexus of identity, with complicated boundaries of legitimacy and belonging. Part of it is just that skateboarding looks good on screen - so good that each film features someone who's always got a camera out to record tricks or epic wipeouts, as if they know that what they’re doing is made for the movies. If there's a shared takeaway from all three of these movies, it’s that skating is actually an incredible lens through which to view adolescence.
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The stakes are just lower for Stevie, and for the movie he's in. We get the sense that Stevie may or may not end up internalizing this life lesson about empathy, and, tellingly, that he’ll probably be fine, either way. That ending is, in some ways, where Minding the Gap and Skate Kitchen begin - with the realization that no one is unique in their pain. But I think if you look in anyone else's closet, you wouldn't trade their shit for your shit.
The movie ends with its diminutive hero Stevie (Sunny Suljic) receiving wisdom from Ray (Na-kel Smith), the most mature member of the crew who takes him in, about looking past your own problems to appreciate that everyone's dealing with ones of their own: "A lot of the time we feel our lives are the worst. The difference is in its ambitions it doesn't actually have a lot to say about the sometimes toxic teen dynamics it revels in. Mid90s is a tightly wound person's attempt to make a loose hangout flick, but that's not what makes it feel small in comparison to the other two movies - they're all intimately scaled. Throw in a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, a carefully curated, era-appropriate soundtrack, and warm 16 mm cinematography, and you have a movie that's basically been engineered to be an indie darling. But Mid90s made more in its opening weekend in four theaters than Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap did in their total runs combined - not so surprising, given that it was directed by a movie star and is being released by A24, getting the benefit of the company's halo of hipness and track record of putting out excellent, excruciatingly intimate coming-of-age films like Ladybird and Eighth Grade. And like Skate Kitchen, it's a movie that includes a lot of first-time actors who were sought out for their real-life talent on a board. Mid90s, a Los Angeles–set dramedy about a 13-year-old who falls in with a collection of older teens who hang out at his local skate shop, is, like Minding the Gap, about boys finding different forms of escape through skating. All of them use skating as a backdrop for themes of belonging, gender expectations, class, racial identity, and friendship, and prove it to be startlingly rich territory for stories about coming of age. Jonah Hill's directorial debut Mid90s, currently rolling through theaters, is the biggest - and least incisive - installment of an unintentional trilogy that also includes Crystal Moselle's Sundance fave Skate Kitchen and Bing Liu's personal documentary Minding the Gap.
It's skateboarding that has low-key turned out to be the really interesting teen movie trend of 2018. Forget about the rebirth of the high school rom-com, recently coaxed back to life by Netflix, a collective yearning for comfort, and the dreamy eyes of actor Noah Centineo.
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