REVIEW: The girls of Skate Kitchen are here to show you— not tell you— that women belong in the skate park.
Skater boys have captured the hearts of young girls for decades. At least, that is what has been presented to us on screen from SkaterDater (1965) to Thrashin’ (1986) to Mid90s (2018). Young women, in these types of movies, are depicted as either 1) objects of the male skaters’ affections or 2) faces in the crowd, watching in awe, but not participating themselves. Rarely, are they given the space, much less the spotlight, to shred on their own.
Filmmaker Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen (2018) provides a fresh perspective on the skate-hangout movie. This movie appears to be a feature-length version of Moselle’s first project with the real-life Skate Kitchen crew titled “That One Day” (2016), a 12-minute short film shot for Miu Miu’s Women Tales series. Moselle used the same cast of skateboarders-turned-actresses in “That One Day” and Skate Kitchen with different names for the characters in each film. The narrative was basically the same: Rachelle Vinberg’s character is a lonely teen girl who loves to skateboard but has no friends to do it with, then she meets some girls to do it with. The movie is much deeper than that of course, but that is the general premise.
To go more in depth, Skate Kitchen follows 18-year-old Camille, (Rachelle Vinberg), and her struggle with loneliness, womanhood, and finding community. Camille is shy and, at times, unsure of herself. The one thing she is sure of is that she just wants to skate. But when her mom prohibits her from skateboarding, she feels even more isolated.
Then, she meets the all-female Instagram skateboarding crew, Skate Kitchen, and begins to learn what it means to be a part of something. Camille has never had strong female role models to guide her through her adolescence— no one to ask questions or talk to about her changing body, love or sex. Her mom was distant and her dad couldn’t understand what she was going through. A bit of a late-bloomer, Camille gets advice and insight into young womanhood from her new crew, who act like older sisters guiding her through it all.
This is the best part of Skate Kitchen. The desire to belong is a common theme in coming-of-age movies, but it isn’t often that we see an acceptance and a community for women who do not fit the traditional mold. In many tales regarding young women, there is a push for the protagonist to fit in with the popular “girly girls.” The Skate Kitchen girls prove that you can enjoy typically masculine activities while maintaining your femininity. They are unapologetic about themselves and their favorite pastime, and the crew is adamant on supporting each other within a hypermasculine space. When the girls skate, the boys at the skatepark diss their tricks, takeover their territory and question their credibility (at one point, Kurt, played by Nina Moran, is asked if she can do an ollie by a male passing by, to which she responds, “No bro, I’m a poser. That’s why I have this shit. I thought this was just an accessory.”) Through it all, however, these girls show that they belong in the skate park, and they won’t let the boys push them out.
It is truly magical to watch these girls skate, and it’s awe-inspiring to see how they take major body blows. The crew exhibits a certain strength and power in the way that they move throughout the movie. They are not invincible, as demonstrated by the injuries they incur while skating, but their determination to continue to better themselves as skaters is unbreakable. Director of Photography Shabier Kirchner’s moving shots put the audience right alongside the girls. It creates a shared sense of liberation and excitement, almost as if we’re shredding the streets together.
Beyond the displays of female friendship and thrilling visuals, however, it is a typical coming-of-age movie set in a unique space, but the storyline feels cliche at times— for instance, Camille’s loyalty to her girls falters midway through the movie because she feels torn between her crush and her girls. Moselle admitted in a Q&A session at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that she felt she needed to throw in a boy to “mess things up” in order to write a feature length narrative. In reality, Skate Kitchen would have been fine without the boy drama. There’s already enough conflict with the constant sexism from the other male skaters in the movie without Camille having to “betray” her friends. It was an addition that felt unnecessary to pushing the narrative forward. Camille has enough issues to deal with than to potentially throw away her newly formed bonds with the other girls, especially for a guy whose friends constantly talk smack about her and her crew.
Regardless, sisterhood (albeit predictably) triumphs over boy drama in the end, and the girls are off skating again. The allure of Skate Kitchen is not really the story, but the characters— the women themselves, their fearless personalities in the face of doubtful men, and their genuine love for skateboarding. A lot of this can be attributed to the actresses themselves, who are all members of the real-life Skate Kitchen. They experience misogyny, alienation, and physical injury everyday, and they rise above it in order to continue to do what they love. The Skate Kitchen crew skillfully translates their real-life experience into the narrative, making the film an authentic look into what it means to be a female skateboarder.
Despite its shortcomings, Skate Kitchen is a fun, refreshing, and liberating coming-of-age tale with more depth than its male narrative counterpart that also came out in 2018— Jonah Hill’s Mid90s. While Mid90s provided an equal amount of hypermasculine male skaters, it made less of a statement through its characters and storyline. At times, Mid90s felt like it was simultaneously trying too hard and too little to send a message about masculinity and allowing oneself to be vulnerable. The characters act hard, perpetuate patterns of physical abuse, objectify women, and enable each other to repress their emotions. It isn’t until the last thirty minutes of the movie that one character, Ray (Na-Kel Smith), explains to the protagonist that he doesn’t have to act tough to be a man. It’s a sweet moment, one of the highlights of the movie in fact, but it feels superficial compared to the rest of the movie’s depictions of violence and sexist behavior. The characters in Skate Kitchen, on the other hand, exhibit the same discomfort of emotional vulnerability, but slowly grow to overcome it in order to better communicate with each other. It takes the whole movie for the girls to open up to each other fully. It isn’t something that can be done in ten out of 85 minutes (ahem, Jonah Hill). As for meaningful commentary on masculinity in the skating world, Skate Kitchen beats Mid90s by a longshot.
Skateboarding movies received a lot of attention in 2018, but Skate Kitchen did not get as much hype or praise as Mid90s or Bing Liu’s introspective documentary Minding the Gap. While Mid90s was a hit at the box-office and Minding the Gap snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, Skate Kitchen appears to have been left in the dust.
These things shouldn’t overshadow the significance of Skate Kitchen as a skateboarding film, and one that explicitly shows that women can exist and thrive in traditionally masculine spaces. Regardless of the nominations or awards it has missed, it is not a movie one should miss if they have any remote interest in skateboarding movies.
Skate Kitchen will be playing in the Bright Family Screening Room on February 19.
