A24 Season: Mid90's (Dir Jonah Hill, 1h25m, 2018)

Film producing and distribution are not perhaps the most glamorous jobs in Hollywood. For every Troma, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, Hammer, or Cannon, there are myriad other, far less free-wheelin', production companies that carry the nuts and bolts required to hold the world of cinema together. More often than not, those that stand alone, hallmarked by a particular quality, they're run by mavericks, who tread the tightrope between financial security and auteurist veracity every time they make a film.

They're also, in an age where film production resembles the (bad) old days of the studio system, an increasingly rare beast. That was, until A24 stepped onto the scene; based in New York, and fronted by three veterans of the industry, Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges, and named for the (remarkably cinematic) Italian highway of the same name, the trio's company has swept into cinema. This season will celebrate what they have become, with four of their most recent films, including both their smash-hits of 2022.

Beginning with small, distinctive indie pieces, including the noirish Spring Breakers (2013), fame-inflected crime drama The Bling Ring (2013), and the science-fiction cum horror duo of Under the Skin and Tusk (both 2014), the studio quickly became as well known for their dramatic outings (Lady Bird, Room, The Florida Project, and the Killing of A Sacred Deer), as their horror output (The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, and The Lighthouse) and has raised the profiles of many of its directors, from Ari Aster to Robert Eggers, and from the Safdie Brothers to Alex Garland. Moreover, with a steady output as a producer and distributor, and with a stack of awards to back it up, A24, as this season will show, are fast becoming an arthouse alternative to the big studios, which still manages to infiltrate the multiplex.

We start though, not with the studio at their most bloodthirsty or their most indie-darling, but with, of all things, the directorial debut for a figure already well-established in modern Hollywood as an actor, in a film that takes us through one summer in the life of a teen boy against the backdrop of 90s Los Angeles, as he drifts away from his family of single-mother and abusive older brother, and into, via a gang of older, and largely disaffected teenage skateboarders, and their chaotic lifestyle and rites of passage, adulthood. Such a film is Mid90's, a remarkably made debut by Jonah Hill, in which the veracity, the grit, the heat and grime, and the very feel of being a teen in those halycion days of the mid 1990s is palpable, and where his teenage protagonist slowly navigates himself into being his own man via superbly wrought vignettes.

It's...fair to say that A24's other great strength, outside idiosyncratic dramas and horrifyingly effective descents into the darkest elements of the human condition, is the coming of age film; their filmography is dotted with them, and whilst Mid90's is far from being a new idea, it is Hill's veracity, his attention to detail, and his secret weapon of star, Sunny Suljic (already a star of screen, and uh, screen, through his voice work in tremendously popular game, God Of War's Nordic reboot, and his role as the taut A Killing of a Sacred Deer's narrative lynchpin), that makes the film. Nowhere is this more obvious that the film's opening sequence; the walls are festooned with period appropriate posters, Stevie (Suljic) is wearing a Street Fighter II tee, and sitting by a TMNT-themed bed, and when his brother, Ian, appears mere minutes later to mete out punishment in bruising fashion, it is in an familiar fascimilie of the 90s white kid trying to dress like a black rapper, his room later revealled to be a near shrine to the Wu Tang and their ilk.

But visual and sonic veracity is only half the picture- whilst this film never misses a period appropriate needle drop, nor a trend or t-shirt slogan, nor, through its sunbleached filming, does it ever fail to capture the era it depicts, from block parties, to the rise of skateboarding as a way up for its heroes, out of the gutter into superstardom-it is through its narrative and characters that it truly captures the period. Stevie's world is that of so many latchkey kids of the late 80s to mid 80s, filled with the collision of mass consumerism, of MTV, and tween entertainment, with the gritted reality of being disadvantaged or bereft of friends outside of distant siblings. The film's editing style lends itself perfectly to this; at points, DoP Christopher Blauvelt perfectly captures the fuzz of home videoing, or in some cases, the scuzzy footage of 90s skateboarding videos. It's immediately evocative, and does as much as the music and fashion to place things in the 90s.

The charmingly runtish Stevie soon ventures out of the house and the oppression of his brother (an enjoyably uncaged Lucas Hedges, who simmers in cruelty throughout the first half of the movie), into the sphere of influence of a group of skateboarders who hang out in and around a shop nearby, and with whom Stevie quickly strikes up a friendship with, from the bragging, and hard partying Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt), and Ruben, who acts as Stevie's initial mentor to the group, (Gio Gallcia) to the quiet, would-be-filmmaker, Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), and the leader of the group, Ray, an aspiring professional skateboarder (Na-Kel Smith, a real-life professional skateboarder, rap musician, etc.) who acts as the heart of the group, and a mentor figure to Stevie and the rest, despite the complexity of the group's home-lives.

Just having these five characters bouncing off each other, as several scenes basically boil down to being, is a delight, and whilst the language comes thick and fast, anyone who regards the film as going too far in this regard when much of the film has an undertow of permissive behaviour to it is missing the point. That, for many of the gang, this is their first, and in some cases only major role to date says as much about Hill's abilities to pick his cast, as his cast are responsible for the energy that flows through this film. That our gang of skateboarders at once feel like a surrogate family for Stevie, protecting him from the menacing presence of his older brother, and simultaneously a bad influence upon him.

Here, again, the film's veracity becomes almost white-hot; whilst there are elements that can be compared to the aforementioned Harmony Corine's Gummo (1997), from the hard rock and hip-hop soundtrack to the grit and squalor of 90s childhood-nowhere else can it be seen better than in the film's descent into the darker elements of an untethered childhood. We see Stevie partake of cigarettes, alcohol, and eventually drugs and sex, as he is slowly drawn into the group's inner circle, is a remarkably nuanced thing. Even Stevie's mother, who seems a distant figure, and his thuggish older brother, eventually reduced to a blubbering wreck by the gulf between their experiences, are treated as three-dimensional characters, even if their role is simply to represent the staid-at-home life that Stevie is trying to escape.

There is something remarkable about this veracity, this ability to balance the figures in Stevie's life, so that none of them either become too much of a caricature or mockery of the role they play, that his brother is at once an abusive figure and one capable of, at the film's denouement, kindness and empathy for his brother, that Ray, Fuckshit, Ruben and Fourth Grade are capable of building Stevie into his own person, and reckless hedonists that introduce him to their dead-end lifestyles. One of the film's most superb moments is when this curtain drops, where Ray reveals that the figures that Stevie idolises are revealled to be just as fallible, just as mortal, and whose home lives and prospects are veritable degrees worse than his. With a longer runtime, with more of a focus on the bigger picture, perhaps the film could have explored the lives of Stevie's friends, or indeed the colossal inequality of the mid 90s, or the festering racism that had already lit the powder-keg that exploded as the LA riots in 1992, or upon the homeless man (a cameo by Del the Funky Homosapien) who finds himself out of time with the world around him. But our protagonist is a dumb white kid-we see the world from his perspective-and from this angle, the film feels like snapshots, vignettes, from this summer.

It is a film driven by mood, from the two sequences that practically bookend Stevie's induction into the group, in which the camera holds, mid-street, and simply waits for its characters to sweep down on skateboards towards it, the sound muted, the music high. These are moments of beauty among the chaos of existence; the needle drop on Hungarian rockers 1969 hit Gyöngyhajú lány, that crashes in like a tidal wave is (for all the self-referentialism to Kanye West's liberal sampling on "New Slaves"), astonishly affecting and effective, this otherworldly blast of 60s Hungarian psychedelia dumped into the mid90s . It is a perfect moment, the music-video pan up to the roof on which our gang pull off tricks, as the band blasts into life, perfectly blunted by Stevie missing his trick, smashing his head into the bench underneath and the needle jarring out. It's a trick that the film's trailer pulls to equally magnificent results. It's one of the great moments of a film pieced together from great moments.

There's, more than anything though, a sense of nostalgia with Mid90's. The film has the feel of home movies dug up from an old box in the attic, (indeed, the film's naming conceit turns out to be something between a home movie and pure reportage from Fourth Grade, finally making good on making a movie, or a scrap-book. It is a film of moments-caught like photographs, or candid camcorder footage-and through these vignettes, we enter the life of a young man between childhood and adulthood, in a perfectly made, superbly observed homage-and it cannot be anything but a homage to that era-to what it meant to grow up in those half-remembered days of the mid 1990s.

Rating: Highly Recommended.

Like articles like this? Want them up to a week early? Why not support me on my Patreon from just £1/$1.20 a month! https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond