A lot of the time we feel that our lives the worst, but I think that if you looked in anybody else’s closet, you wouldn’t trade your shit for their shit. So let’s go. Thirteen-year old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) is living in a tough home with his co-dependent mother Dabney (Katherine Waterston) and bullying older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges). However he escapes through his love of skateboarding and when he befriends a local crew of older kids who like to get stoned, including Ray (Na-Kel Smith), Ruben (Gio Galicia), Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin) and Fuckshitt (Olan Prenatt), he learns to stop self-harming and become the person he is meant to be and finally stands up for himself … You literally take the hardest hits out of anybody I’d ever seen in my life. You know you don’t have to do that, right? Told with affection and not a little verve, this is a winning writing/directing debut from actor Jonah Hill who owes a debt to Harmony Korine and Larry Clark (Kids) in terms of an almost affectless, naturalistic approach to this rites of passage tale about negotiating masculinity at a crucial time of formation. It benefits enormously from Suljic’s central performance which gives some ballast to a tough family dynamic. Waterston is very good as the single mom who tends to over-share; Hedges delivers that typical dead-eyed inexpressivity as surely as his vicious fraternal punches when he’s wearing a Bill Clinton mask. But there is a certain joyousness among the skateboarding gang who live like teenage outlaws, a group united in their bad home lives but fractured by differing ambitions. When Stevie has his initiation into the joys of girls, Estee (Alexa Demie) expresses to her girlfriends what everyone thinks about him at this point – he has great hair. Another girl informs her that after what she’s let him do and see, He’ll worship you forever! This is mostly an episodic narrative, a slice of 90s life filled with authentic banter and silliness, punctuated with absurdism, violence and giggles. Sometimes your friends get you through everything, just by hanging out, zipping along the streets and along buildings on a wooden board while you tag along, stumbling, trying to keep up. Like life. You’re so cute. You’re, like, at that age before guys become dicks
mondomovies 