Watched mid90s tonight. It's Jonah Hill's first movie.
It's all about a tween kid who falls in with a sketchy skateboard crew of older teenage boys. It's all mid90s skate culture.
It's so Jonah Hill, he just oozes through the entire film despite not being in it, which is great, I quite like him.
I wouldn't recommend this to a lot of people because it's not necessarily the most entertaining movie, but damn if it isn't a great film. By that, I mean if you look at it as art, the purpose of art is to make you feel, and this movie is all feel. It's a damn mood and it never once falters from it.
There's no one recognizable in it. The biggest actor is the kid from Manchester By The Sea, and he has a minor role as the kid's asshole brother. Three of the most prominent characters have only this film credit, so they're total unknowns. They're all skateboarders though, so they must have been recruited from that world. They are amazing. The guy who plays "FuckShit" is a gem. Yes, the character's name is FuckShit, and it's great, and the actor is magnetic.
It's not a nice story, and things do not go well for the main kid, but it's about a kid with issues finding others with issues and connecting with them over skateboarding and they're all a bunch of degenerates with issues together forming those kinds of intense bonds and fixations that teens form.
Back to the mood though, music obviously plays a huge role, but not in that overdone nostalgic way. In fact, this movie is not nostalgic. You might become nostalgic if you were a 90s skater kid, but the movie evokes that time in earnest, not in nostalgic retrospect. So the music isn't ham fisted either, it's appropriate to the era, but it blends into the background. This is a product of my beloved Trent Reznor. Speaking of the 90s...
I loved NIN back in the day, and I've loved Reznor's movie music work for decades, and in this movie, the music is so key to the mood, which is what it's all about.
I have one HUGE problem with it though. This fucking 80lb tween has several scenes where he has no experience with drugs or alcohol and manages to consume enough substances to fuck up a well seasoned adult partier, and he manages to get only a bit tipsy and stumbly. It so broke the otherwise perfect immersion for me and that really pissed me off. There were multiple scenes where I was like "How is that tiny child still standing? This is stupid."
So yeah, I'm not necessarily recommending the movie, I'm not sure how many people would really enjoy it, but certain people will absolutely vibe with the mood of it. DH and I both did, but we both have memories of hanging out with degenerate 90s skater punks and getting chased by police because there was no greater social menace at the time than skateboarding youths!