Mid90s
Summer in 90s Los Angeles if you were skateboarding: the park, the streets, the crew you fell in with at the shop, the family problems you couldn’t do anything about. Jonah Hill spent his teenage years in that world, and for his directorial debut he made a film about it—or a version of it, anyway. The protagonist is a thirteen-year-old named Stevie; the film is called Mid90s.
Hill isn’t reaching for transgression or shock. You could make a skateboard film about sex and violence and the darker edges of youth—Ken Park exists exactly in that territory. But Mid90s is quieter, more autobiographical in the way actual childhood feels: small moments, boredom, the sudden intensity of new friendships, family weight you don’t fully understand. The film’s shot on 4:3 DV, that washed-out video aesthetic that actually was the 90s if you lived it, not a stylization of it.
There’s something about returning to a decade through someone who lived it as a kid. The 90s get flattened now into a mood or aesthetic, but Hill is precise about his—LA, that particular skate culture, the loneliness and excitement of being thirteen in that world. That specificity is what matters. This isn’t nostalgia for a decade as a concept; it’s a memory of what it felt like to be there, in that specific place and moment.