The directorial debut can make or break a new auteur. There's been many a filmmaker who has been broken by critical reviews of their beginning work. The hardest of these is when an actor moves to the writer-director capacity. This was the challenge of Mid90s director Jonah Hill. Though he started in comedies such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Superbad, Hill went on to find more critical acclaim. Working for seasoned directors such as Bennett Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and The Coen Brothers, gathered two Academy Award nominations. After working for all of these great directors, Hill has crafted his own effort. The results are absolutely magnificent.
Mid90s is another brilliant coming of age film from A24, which has corned the market on the genre. The young cast, especially Sunny Suljic and Na-kel Smith show the grasp they have on what it is to be an adolescent. They anchor the film in terms of emotional vulnerability. The other brilliant performance in the film is Olan Prenatt who plays the character of "Fuckshit." Prenatt gives an acting job that is oddly reminiscent of Sasha Lane in American Honey. Don't ask me to elaborate on this point, I just can't separate the two performances. The final piece to the young cast is Lucas Hedges, who shows true diversity as the role of the older, loser brother. In my book, Hedges has put himself in a class of talent with Timothee Chalamet as the future master actors of Hollywood. Michelle Williams was originally cast as the single mother of the two boys. For the benefits of the movie, she dropped out and was replaced with the much more believable Katherine Waterston. Waterston plays the perfect 30-something mother who is trying to raise her children with a degree of morality she herself never possessed.
Jonah Hill set out to write a film that was a love letter to the hip-hop culture he grew up with. That is Mid90s biggest asset. So much in cinema, rap is used to show signs of moral depravity among characters or society as a whole. Mid90s shows the genre for what it is, rebellious, beautiful, and outlandish. Those themes are directly tied to the film, as well as the hand-picked soundtrack. Finally, we have a riveting film about hip-hop culture that isn't Straight Outta Compton.
There is some sort of genre that has been brewing up the past five or six years. I'm not sure what to call it, but it focuses on the shunned and frowned of society. Whether it was the transvestite prostitutes of Tangerine, the soul-searching youth of American Honey, or the forgotten motel-bound children of The Florida Project, these films capture their characters essence perfectly. Mid90s fits directly into my new favorite, unnamed genre. Hill has a long career if he continues making films in this vein. My only criticism of the film is that I wanted more of the warm, visceral smile it placed on my face.
Grade (9.5/10)
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