Mid90s (2018)
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Mid90s Movie Review
Mid90s is a 2018 teen film directed by Jonah Hill in what is his directorial debut. It’s a solid and flawed movie that has its problems, but is mostly respectable.
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“A lot of the time we feel that our lives the worst,
but I think that if you looked in anybody else’s closet,
you wouldn’t trade your shit for their shit. So let’s go“
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It follows a 13-year-old boy who begins to hang out with an older group of skateboarders while living in the titular time period. It thankfully isn’t just about skateboarding or the nineties and is deeper than that as it so accurately touches upon boyhood and what it means to be a young boy with all the insecurities and struggles to fit in and prove yourself to the other boys to be “cool” and “popular”. That was all very well done and in particular the boys’ tendency to act tougher than they are is so well portrayed.
However, because this is obviously a directorial debut for Jonah Hill who has been primarily an actor up until this point, it has all those typical problems of a first feature and that is a very shaky, unconfident direction, a lack of a better structure and a lack of bigger cinematic qualities to the picture. Jonah Hill still did a great job for a first director, don’t get me wrong, and this theme, subject matter and time period fits him well and is personal for him, but it shows that this is the debut and I hope he becomes better in his next project, if he makes one.
Sunny Suljic is actually pretty good as Stevie the protagonist and his character is the most interesting and complex of the bunch. I also really liked Lucas Hedges as Ian, his brother. It was an atypical role for him for sure. The other boys are all serviceable and actually very well developed for the short screen time they got. So both as a group and individually, they’re quite solid.
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Mid90s is not all that greatly shot and it felt overly amateurish to me in terms of its style plus the lack of a score bothered me. But it felt like a 90s film so it successfully captured that time period undoubtedly. The dialogue is definitely very strong as is the movie’s emotional investment and the point that it’s trying to make and it did make it well, but I wish the runtime was longer as the movie was too short and structurally weak,
Jonah Hill’s directing is unconfident and troublesome in Mid90s, but still rather respectable for a debut effort. The movie is way too short in its runtime and uninspired in its cinematography, but it is thematically resonant, very truthful in what it has to say and also quite strong in dialogue, characterization and emotion.
