Mid90s (2019) - Movie Review

Coming-of-age stories seem to take on a more meta aspect once it sinks in that, over the last couple years, they’ve served as ample ground for actors to come of age in their own way and become filmmakers in their own. Greta Gerwig went out on the solo tip with Lady Bird, Bo Burnham struck gold with Eighth Grade, and Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart is one of the single best things she’s ever been attached to. And it seems that Jonah Hill, a figure at the nexus for the rises of filmmakers like Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, is stepping into the arena with his own take on when a kid starts to learn how to be an adult. And fucking hell, I don’t know what it says about me that this film appeals to me so damn much, but yeah, that’s what we get here.

From its nostalgia-dipped title, to its literal first frame being the production logo for A24 spelled out with skateboards, this film lives and breathes the era it’s couched in. And not only that, it’s a pretty specific subset of that decade, here being the SoCal skateboarding scene, filled with enough hip-hop needle drops to keep heads bobbing for its just-shy-of-90-minute running time. I spent a lot of my formative years enamoured with skateboard culture, both through video games like the Tony Hawk’s series and through films like Dogtown And Z-Boys, it gave me the feeling that I was watching a group of genuine friends and neighbours just chilling out with their favourite pastime. Having Del Tha Funkee Homosapien show up in a cameo, himself a crucial part of the West Coast underground rap scene, was a nice touch as well.

Of course, this film’s sense of aiming for realism does end up translating into some pretty unsavoury attitudes from basically everyone on screen, and it all starts with the home of the main character Stevie, played with magnetic efficacy by Sunny Suljic. His mother, played by Katherine Waterston, is so open about her romantic life that it… well, it doesn’t quite excuse what we end up seeing later, but it definitely adds to the sexual confusion that Stevie finds himself in. And as for Lucas Hedges as his brother, this is one of the best depictions of the paper tiger older brother I’ve seen in years. He’s violently abusive, constantly talks shit, but once he runs into Stevie’s new friends, the only thing that vacates quicker than his resolve is the contents of his bladder.

From there, the group that Stevie finds himself in to get away from that shit are basically straight from the Harmony Korine school of lower-middle-class Americana. This is quite intentional, between Hill’s statements about how much Kids influenced this film’s aesthetic, and the fact that Korine himself shows up in a silent cameo. However, while Kids felt to me as too defeatist and a little exploitative of its cultural surroundings, this film feels a lot more earnest and, while unashamedly nostalgic, makes no pretences about the character of these people.

And in the midst of all this, we have the classic story of Stevie essentially trying to find his tribe, the people that he can connect with for reasons other than they share genetic material. I immediately regret typing that sentence, given the sex scene that pops up, but credit to Jonah Hill in that it is the least exploitative and lurid framing he could have possibly given to it. It really comes across like he wanted to include it for the sake of realism, which given the smoking and the drinking and the anarchic anger shown throughout is fitting, but he didn’t want to turn it into something like Breath, where the whole thing is so drawn-out that it’s almost-impossible not to feel icky while watching it.

It’s a wholehearted showing of nostalgia for a bygone era, but one that dwells within that era and gives the inside perspective, as opposed to something like Captain Marvel where they literally crash-land into it from the outside. The acting is solid, the soundtrack is so fucking choice it gives Booksmart a run for its money, and while there isn’t much in the way of plot, it serves instead as a fitting and quite effective snapshot of life on film. One that keeps all the distasteful shit intact, and I’m doubtless that some will object to it to varying degrees, but in the name of some kind of emotional honesty, it works.

 If this is Jonah Hill starting out on the writing/directing feature-length run, and he’s already shown real strength with thematic storytelling between this and his music video for Danny Brown’s Ain’t It Funny, he joins the list of first-time filmmakers worth keeping an eye on.