‘Lords of Dogtown’

This film about skateboarding in the ’70s captures the misery of being a teenager.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

Real-life Zephyr Tony Alva, left, is played by Victor Rasuk, right, in Lords of Dogtown.

   The big, dumb movies Hollywood has always loved to make keep getting bigger and dumber, but there’s a lot more than that to American film. Plenty of independent directors — think Terence Malick, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Lisa Cholodenko, Mike Judge, Pixar’s John Lasseter, Albert Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Doug Liman, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, Steve James, and Errol Morris, for a start — are building interesting bodies of work, making movies that are original at worst and brilliant at best. With Lords of Dogtown, her second feature, Catherine Hardwicke has taken her place in that group, proving that her powerhouse debut, Thirteen, was no fluke.
   A quintessential American story told in a quintessentially American style, Dogtown is about the transformation of skateboarding by a group of street kids in the 1970s. The kids, a handful of surfers and skateboarders who lived in Venice Beach, formed a team called the Zephyrs, named after the surf shop where they hung out. Screenwriter Stacy Peralta, a Zephyr who went on to become a professional skateboarder and filmmaker, has already told their story in his 2001 documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys. That Dogtown was first-rate too, but he was smart to remake it, since the fictionalized film feels more "real" than the doc. Listening to middle-aged men recall the past just can’t compete with watching gifted and artfully filmed young actors recreate it.
   The Zephyrs in Hardwicke’s film skateboard through the streets and back alleys of their scruffy oceanside neighborhood like a low-tech motorcycle gang, slaloming between trashcans, vaulting over empty crates and whooshing between lines of idling cars. Jay Adams (the charismatically brooding Emile Hirsch), who’s described in a crawl at the end as "the spark that ignited the sport," leaves his apartment like a cartoon superhero, jumping from his second-story window onto a neighbor’s roof, skating down the slope and soaring off the edge to hit the street at a boiling roll.
   Though there were eight or so Zephyrs, the movie focuses primarily on three: Jay, who was probably the most talented and definitely the most troubled of the group; Tony Alva (Victor Rasul of Raising Victor Vargas), the most ambitious; and Peralta (John Robinson), the least rebellious. Stacy is such an upright citizen that, as their mentor Skip points out with disdain, he actually wears a watch.
   We also see a lot of Tony’s stand-up sister Kathy (Nikki Reed, the co-writer and star of Thirteenwas Kilmer until he took off his dark glasses, Skip comes to life here much more fully than he does in the documentary. Irascible, manipulative, never as much in control as he pretends to be, and perpetually loaded, he’s also a natural leader, and he’s genuinely fond of the kids who cluster around him. He molds them first into a makeshift family and then into a team, functioning for a while as the closest thing some of them have to a father.
   The desaturated, grainy look of much of the film, along with judicious use of slow motion and jerky, slightly speeded-up footage, create a sense of heightened reality and intensify the focus on the sheer velocity of the Zephyrs’ moves. To capture the rush of their surfing and skating, Hardwicke hired a champion skateboarder as a cameraman and shot some scenes herself from a Jet Ski, a surfboard and a motorcycle. The camera remains close to the kids, sometimes assuming their point of view as they barrel up and down the sides of an aqueduct, the inside of a gigantic pipe or the walls of the swimming pools where they developed their swooping, wall-climbing technique during the drought that emptied the pools of Los Angeles.
   You realize just how well the film has recreated the Zephyrs’ bad-boy cool when Stacy and Tony, seduced by the money and fame they can get by representing skateboard manufacturers, start showing up in their Evel Knievel-like custom-made jumpsuits. Doing stunts for the camera or making a guest appearance on Charlie’s Angels in their color-coordinated suits and headbands, they look ridiculous. Their outfits and settings are all the commentary the filmmakers need to make on how consumerism cannibalizes youth culture but, just for giggles, they give Jay the last word. "Stacy looks like a stock car," he scoffs.
   Hardwicke, who started her movie career as a production designer, can convey a lot of information just by panning over a detailed set, like the grimy crash pad where Jay lives with his dreamily unhappy hippie mom. She also knows how to make a point wittily and without belaboring it: we learn how hard it is to do what the boys do, for instance, by watching a cocky astronaut humiliate himself by giving it a try during a photo op with Stacy.
   Rooted in the primordial ooze of adolescence, Hardwicke’s movie captures the misery of being a teenager with troubles at home, the joy of achieving physical transcendence and the struggle to find a balance between authenticity and ambition. And that makes for a powerful brew, as exhilarating as it is poignant.
Rated PG-13. Contains drug and alcohol use, sexuality, violence, language and reckless behavior involving teens.