A coming-of-age tale about a 13-year-old from a dysfunctional family who finds an identity through skateboarding, 21 Jump Street star Jonah Hill’s directorial debut is nothing if not studious in its evocation of its eponymous period setting. As distractingly fetishistic about the 1990s as Stranger Things is about the 1980s, the LA-set film lingers over meticulously curated pop-culture ephemera, grooves to meticulously curated soundtrack cuts (The Pixies, Wu Tang Clan, Nirvana, The Pharcyde) and replicates the cinematic aesthetics of the era by using 16mm film stock and Hi8 video with fish-eye lenses to respectively capture the grainy look of the indie movies coming through Sundance and the rough-and-ready skate videos Spike Jonze was pioneering.
