Big screen skateboarding — once mostly deployed to denote 80s-era, youthful rebellion — suddenly appears to be undergoing something of a cultural rehabilitation. Jonah Hill’s buzzy directorial debut Mid90s will ollie into US cinemas later this year and, here, clattering down the pavement is Skate Kitchen: a lyrical, affecting feminist drama that wowed plenty at this year’s Sundance.
Directed and co-written by Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack), it embeds a lightly fictionalised story in the very real world of the all-female skate crew that gives the film its name. We meet Long island skateboarder Camille (real-life skater and Skate Kitchen co-founder Rachelle Vinberg) just after she suffers a grisly injury in her local park (“It’s not my period,” she snaps, at some jeering boys). Her fearful single mother (Orange Is The New Black’s Elizabeth Rodriguez) imposes a skateboarding ban but soon — hooked on social media clips posted by a rowdy gang of girl skaters — she makes the long journey to a Manhattan skatepark and finds herself absorbed into their weed-clouded, hellraising posse.
Beautifully shot and gleefully foul-mouthed.
It’s a familiar tale, then, of a quiet, troubled outsider finding acceptance among a band of likeminded misfits. However, amid the expected story beats — a hedonistic warehouse party with echoes of Larry Clark’s Kids, the friendship-straining arrival of Jaden Smith’s love interest — Moselle and the collaborators in her cast manage to capture something that feels fresh, infectiously joyful and (through its depiction of young girls existing in a frequently sexist subculture) quietly revolutionary.
Yes, there are moments when the limitations of an inexperienced cast (mostly made up of real skaters) are apparent but the meandering, improvised mood gives the action a vital wrinkle of authenticity. Beautifully shot and gleefully foul-mouthed, it’s an eloquent love letter to freedom, friendship and modern girlhood in all its messy, unconventional glory.
