Mid90s review: Jonah Hill directs a pin-sharp coming-of-age tale

Dir: Jonah Hill; Cast: Sunny Suljic, Katherine Waterston, Lucas Hedges, Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Ryder McLaughlin, Gio Galicia. 15 cert, 85 mins.

Is there a word to describe the opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, it’s crackling away in every frame of Jonah Hill’s Mid90s, which feels less like a wistful backward glance at its director’s youth than a relic from it, shoved in a shoebox at the time and only recently unearthed. Hill is the comic actor known for Superbad and The Wolf of Wall Street, but his directorial debut isn’t as broad as you might expect.

Rather, it’s an admirably low-key coming-of-age piece set in the litter-blown sprawl of Los Angeles 20-some years ago, where doe-eyed 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) is scanning the environs for his niche. His elder brother Ian (Lucas Hedges) is a bully and a loner, blustering around in a permanent rage, while his mother (Katherine Waterston) is loving but always slightly absent – a single parent keenly aware she’s on the brink of a tricky phase. Setting his sights instead on the slightly older boys he sometimes sees larking around on their boards outside the local skate shop, Stevie decides to passively befriend them, and hovers on the edge of their personal space until they relent and wave him in.

Played by Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Ryder McLaughlin and Gio Galicia, they’re an appealing, well-observed pick-and-mix of types: Ray (Smith) is the de facto leader with a caring streak and the skating skills to potentially go pro; Fourth Grade (McLaughlin) a budding filmmaker of limited academic capacity; Ruben (Garcia) a wiry, crop-haired nuisance who clearly savours no longer being the youngest member of the group.

Then there’s Prenatt’s character, a gregarious slacker whose nickname can’t be reproduced here without six asterisks, and which doubles as his go-to double-expletive whenever one of the others pulls off a challenging trick. “Can I call him that?” frets Stevie. “I wouldn’t call anyone anything yet,” cautions Ruben with an amusingly affected worldly air, as the two share a menthol cigarette.

Like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Mid90s is clearly informed by its writer-director’s own teenage years, though it’s less geared towards intimate character study than it is a pin-sharp evocation of the time and place in which it’s set. Hill’s film keeps quietly noticing things that barely count as period detail, but are oddly resonant nonetheless, like the plastic water bottles the size of car batteries the kids swig from in the afternoon heat. We’re by Stevie’s side during most of the usual coming-of-age firsts, including a tongue-swirling clinch at a house party that recalls the underage fumblings of Larry Clark’s Kids – a blazingly controversial teen-skate-culture film which actually was made in the mid-Nineties. But Hill makes it sweet rather than provocative, and in the freewheeling debrief that follows, one girl teasingly tells Stevie’s companion, “He’s going to worship you for the rest of his f---ing life.”

The script is peppered with Hill’s trademark abrasive humour, including a running gag in which Ruben cautions Stevie against saying thank you because good manners are a sign of homosexuality. (I thought the joke was ludicrous enough not to feel like a cheap shot; your mileage may vary.) But Mid90s cares less about making you laugh than enveloping you in the moment, even when the moments consist of nothing more than killed time – daft small talk, the lazy throb of hip hop, the therapeutic purr and slap of skateboard wheels on concrete. After its slight 85 minutes had passed, I wasn’t immediately sure how much of it had mattered. It was a lovely, strangely reassuring feeling.