Of course you want to know first how much of his own childhood is in "Mid90s". Jonah Hill takes the question calmly, he has often had to answer it: "My film is not meant as a biopic or documentary, some things happened to me, others are experiences of friends - and I just made up a lot of things when I did that The script wrote, for example, the characters of the boys, "he said last week on a brief interview on the phone.
The directorial debut of the 35-year-old US actor and comedy star ("Superbad", "The Wolf of Wall Street") premiered in the fall of 2018 at the Toronto Film Festival and celebrated in February in the Panorama of the Berlinale as a crowd favorite. The "boys" Hill talks about are the lead actors in his film, a group of teens of different backgrounds and backgrounds who come together in a skateboarder's shop in LA in the 1990s.
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"Mid90s": The little skater-trampsThe main character, and maybe something like Hill's alter ego, is Stevie (Sunny Suljic), who with his Peanuts stature, Wuschelkopf and scumbag grin on the one hand still very childlike, on the other hand already wearing a crumpling on the face, sometimes to the young Robert De Niro recalls.
That could be because he is confronted with the hardships of life early on: The first scene of the film lets him sail through the hallway of the family apartment and bounce hard, his half - strong older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges) angrily drags on him, im Mirror he looks after this beating not without pride the hematoma on his narrow chest. The single mom (Katherine Waterston), who was herself a teen when she got Ian, barely interferes with the toxic brotherhood, she's busy with alternate lovers or absent.
"Mid90s"
USA 2018
Director: Jonah Hill
Screenplay: Jonah Hill
Performers: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katherine Waterston, Olan Prenatt, Na-kel Smith, Gio Galicia
Production: A24, IAC Films, Waypoint Entertainment
Rental: MFA
Length: 85 minutes
FSK: from 12 years
Theatrical release: 7th March 2019
So Stevie drifts through the sun-drenched neighborhood - hooking up with some older guys hanging out in the skate shop or testing their skills in the backyard.
Initiated by the still pummeled Ruben (Gio Galicia), who sells his old board, Stevie gets to know the hierarchies, characters and rules of this band of Misfits : The black Ray, played by skater star Na-kel Smith, takes on cooler Behold the leader role. His buddy and counterpart is "Fuckshit" (Olan Prenatt), whose mouth is at least as loose as the golden curly mane over his Latin complexion. "Fourth Grade" (Ryder McLaughlin), a spotty, rather shy white bread, captures the gang's adventure on video.
When adolescent, politically wonderfully incorrect joking about the question of whether synonymous black sunburn can get, Stevie is completely overwhelmed: "What are blacks?", He asks after a long hesitation quietly in the round - and has it, as the laughter ebbs , earned his nickname: "Sunburn".
This scene had him busy the writing the longest, says screenwriter and director debutant Hill, not only because he had to think carefully, as he now considered offensive racism and abusive words (including the N-word) in the teenager While the nineties still float freely, adequately portray them, but because it touches the core of its story: "When you're young, it's all about the social currency that makes you more visible in a group, it defines your status and Value, "he says. "Why did Stevie get access to this group because he was funny!" White, black or brown, these categories do not matter here.
In the video: The trailer for "Mid90s"
AP
Born in LA in 1983, Hill grew up in the upscale Cheviot Hills neighborhood south of Beverly Hills, but worked as a teenager even in a skateboarding shop on Westwood Boulevard. "Skateboarding got me out of a bubble I was in, about my social and ethnic environment, and it opened my world."
And so opens in Hills small but intensely narrated film also for Stevie a new sense of community: These kids may not be "alright", but they are always wide: It is, in spite of minority, gekifft, smoked and drunk - and on At a party, the cute little guy, who is increasingly prone to cockiness and bravado, is almost deflowered even by an older girl.
All this, including a dramatic finale, describes Hill rather in a soft, youth-free Spielberghaftigkeit, instead of how once in Larry Clark in "Kids" the drug and sex excesses of children relentlessly illuminate. Nevertheless, "Mid90s" has more to offer than nostalgic retro flair: Comedy Berserker Hill, who recently showed in the Netflix mini-series "Maniac" as a slimmer, to subtlety prone character mime, recommends 35 years as a sensitive indie filmmaker, who was smart enough not to throw his status as a Holllywood star here in the balance.
Instead, he bet on his young newcomer ensemble and an unobtrusive, almost casual tone for his coming-of-age drama. "There were many obstacles along the way," says Hill, "many people said to me," You're a successful comedian, stay with it! "But that did not match my inner voice, and at some point I got to the point, no longer afraid of it having to try things that I wanted to do, no matter what others expect me to do, it took me a long time to gather that inner strength. " One can say: From the mid-nineties to today.