Jonah Hill directs Sunny Suljic, Olan Prenatt and Na-kel Smith in this teen drama about an awkward kid becoming accepted by a group of skaters.

Yeah, this got me. Not the funniest, nor most intellectual teen movie made yet it hits a seam of truth beautifully and works that seam gloriously for its easy to digest running time. Hill captures all the doubt, hurt and conflict of trying to fit in with kids who don’t know who they are when you definitely don’t know who you are. These kids are united by skating… the drinking and the hanging out are what convince though. Hill gives us the tribal joy of rolling down a street lane together, the pain of realising how difficult it is for kids to articulate jealousy and loneliness. We get glimpses of alcoholism, self harm and poverty… not in an afterschool special finger wagging way… just to add to the reality. There’s a melancholy that overrides the nostalgia, a foul mouthed inarticulacy that smothers any scripted wit. It is film that will make you laugh out loud, wish you were there, wish you weren’t. It might well be the Dazed and Confused for this generation. It might well be almost as fine a piece of filmmaking as that genre pinnacle.

9