Mid90s ** (2018, Sunny Suljic, Katherine Waterston, Lucas Hedges) – Movie Review

Writer-director Jonah Hill’s intense and edgy 2018 coming of age drama Mid90s stars Sunny Suljic as out-of-control 13-year-old Stevie, a Nineties-era Los Angeles kid who spends his summer breaking away from his troubled home life with his uninterested mom (Katherine Waterston) and his abusive, bullying brother (Lucas Hedges) to hang out with a group of troubled new skateboarder friends he’s met at a Motor Avenue skate shop.

They include the surprisingly saintly Ray (Na-kel Smith), Stevie’s bestie Ruben (Gio Galicia), the dim Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt), and the dimmer Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin).

The self harming Stevie steals, lies, swears, smokes, drinks and takes drugs, and parties, making hay with Estee (Alexa Demie), and gets into a fair bit of trouble, including a couple of potentially fatal accidents. Somehow we are still supposed to like him, and his unappealing friends too, but Jonah Hill doesn’t make much of a case for this. They are just there, and that’s it. Maybe we are supposed to feel sorry for them, but they seem like a bunch of time-wasting losers. OK. let’s blame the parents: we meet only Stevie’s mom and she’s a waste of time.

Mid90s plays pretty much like a home movie, and, as well as realistic, is about as entertaining and revealing as one. It is lively enough, but adds little to the many previous films about skateboarders and troubled American teens. Suljic is quite good, but Waterston and Hedges can do little with their unappealing roles and are wasted. It is hard to get a handle on what their problems actually are. The skater gang look right and real, but they are played by boys with obviously little acting experience.

It is shot in narrow screen so this is how it looks in a cinema:

You can imagine how this, and the short running time of 85 minutes, add to the sense of disappointment in Mid90s as a night out. It is obviously intended as slice of life, impressionist film-making, but its lack of story and resolution is frustrating. Its tagline of ‘Fall, get back up’ promises one thing, but the movie seems down and depressing and disturbing rather than uplifting. Admittedly it feels like a convincingly accurate and realistic depiction of the situations and people of LA in the Mid90s.

It is rated R and UK 15 for pervasive language, sexual content, drug and alcohol use, violent behaviour and disturbing images – all involving minors. There are several homophobic and racial slurs.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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Lucas Hedges plays the older abusive brother in Mid90s (2018).