# Mid90s
**Mid90s** (stylized in lowercase) is a 2018 American coming-of-age comedy-drama written and directed by [Jonah Hill](https://www.edgepedia.org/jonah-hill) in his feature directorial debut, distributed by A24. Set in 1990s Los Angeles, it follows 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) over a formative summer in which he navigates a troubled home life and falls in with a crew of older skateboarders he meets at a Motor Avenue skate shop.[1](https://a24films.com/films/mid90s) • [2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | October 18, 2018, in theaters (A24); running time 84 minutes[1](https://a24films.com/films/mid90s) |
| Writer-director | Jonah Hill's feature directorial debut; he also wrote the screenplay[1](https://a24films.com/films/mid90s) • [3](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d442e3e4b0d06bf5f85305/t/5d10d36fdb9e920001d8d338/1561383794592/Mid90s_Presse%2BPRINT.pdf) |
| Principal cast | Sunny Suljic (Stevie), Lucas Hedges (Ian), Katherine Waterston (Dabney), Na-kel Smith (Ray), Olan Prenatt (Fuckshit), Ryder McLaughlin (Fourth Grade), Gio Galicia (Ruben)[2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/) |
| Visual style | Shot on Super 16mm film in a 4:3 aspect ratio by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt[4](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mid90s-review-20181018-story.html) |
| Rating | R, for pervasive language, sexual content, drug and alcohol use, and some violent behavior, all involving minors[4](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mid90s-review-20181018-story.html) |
| Critical reception | Metascore 66 (generally favorable) from 45 critic reviews; Rotten Tomatoes score 81%, Certified Fresh[2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/) • [5](https://www.flixster.com/movie/mid90s/7ad8d286-c42c-4d3a-ad4a-e9e3c22796b2/reviews/critic) |
| Production companies | A24, IAC Films, Illegal Civ, Waypoint Entertainment[2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/) |
## Spoilers
### Plot and characters
Stevie lives with his single mother, Dabney ([Katherine Waterston](https://www.edgepedia.org/katherine-waterston)), and his older brother Ian ([Lucas Hedges](https://www.edgepedia.org/lucas-hedges)), whose treatment of him is physically abusive; the film opens with an altercation between the brothers.[6](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/18/mid90s-review-jonah-hills-directorial-debut) • [7](https://sites.uw.edu/film/2018/10/25/mid90sreview/) Alienated at home and at school, Stevie takes refuge at a local skate shop, where he is gradually adopted by a group of older teenagers: the ringleader Ray (Na-kel Smith), the troublemaker Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt), the quiet, camera-carrying Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), and the aggressive Ruben (Gio Galicia).[2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/) • [8](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/mid90s/) Over the summer he takes up skateboarding, starts drinking and smoking, and explores a new teenage identity, while his mother views his new friends with alarm.[9](https://thatshelf.com/tiff-2018-mid90s-review/) • [10](https://britfilms.de/assets/uploads/StudyGuides/BF13/mid90s_studyguide.pdf)
The film's poster tagline, "Fall. Get back up.", reflects its central idea that growth is measured by how a person picks himself up after taking hard hits, on the board and off it.[2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/) • [10](https://britfilms.de/assets/uploads/StudyGuides/BF13/mid90s_studyguide.pdf)
## Production and style
**A reverse skate video.** Hill described his guiding concept to [The New Yorker](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-new-yorker): a skate video is "all skating and three seconds of bonding and friendship and chaos," so he set out to make "a reverse skate video," showing bits of skating revolving around a kid's life and friendships rather than the other way around.[11](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/jonah-hill-faithfully-re-creates-the-raw-fleeting-years-of-skate-culture-in-mid90s) • [12](https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/18/movies/jonah-hill-mid-90s-skate-video-toy-machine-interview)
The film was shot on Super 16mm film stock in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, a choice Hill and his collaborators settled on in preproduction so that the footage, including the home-video material shot by the character Fourth Grade, would feel like it was filmed by the people on screen.[4](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mid90s-review-20181018-story.html) • [13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLVIdn8CYE) • [14](https://screenanarchy.com/2018/10/new-york-2018-interview-jonah-hill-looks-back-on-mid90s.html) Reviewers noted the grainy, naturalistic look as central to the film's period feel, alongside period details such as Air Jordans, cassette mix tapes, and a soundtrack spanning [Bad Brains](https://www.edgepedia.org/bad-brains), Nirvana, Seal, and [Morrissey](https://www.edgepedia.org/morrissey).[15](https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/jonah-hills-directorial-debut-is-a-sweet-and-authentic-coming-of-age-story-but-it-feels-like-he-forgot-to-finish-it/2018/10/24/b7280424-d493-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html?noredirect=on)
**Casting.** Hill cast real skateboarders and non-professional actors alongside trained performers; Suljic is a professional actor and skater, while Smith, Prenatt, McLaughlin, and Galicia were newcomers whose casting gave the film what the Washington Post called "a welcome dash of warmth and spontaneity."[13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLVIdn8CYE) • [3](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d442e3e4b0d06bf5f85305/t/5d10d36fdb9e920001d8d338/1561383794592/Mid90s_Presse%2BPRINT.pdf) • [15](https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/jonah-hills-directorial-debut-is-a-sweet-and-authentic-coming-of-age-story-but-it-feels-like-he-forgot-to-finish-it/2018/10/24/b7280424-d493-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html?noredirect=on) Costume designer Heidi Bivens drew on skate magazines she had kept from 1994 and 1995 to dress the cast.[16](https://hungermag.com/editorial/decoding-the-sartorial-magic-of-jonah-hills-mid90s)
Hill has said the film is not autobiographical, though it is centered on the same time and place as his own childhood in 1990s Los Angeles skate culture.[4](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mid90s-review-20181018-story.html) • [17](https://theithacan.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/11.08.18.pdf)
## Place in skate cinema
Critics routinely placed Mid90s in a lineage of films about teenage skate culture, most often beside [Larry Clark](https://www.edgepedia.org/larry-clark)'s *Kids* (1995), a darker New York study that Hill acknowledged as an influence while describing his own film as more optimistic.[18](https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/19/movies/mid90s-jonah-hill-american-graffiti-dazed-confused-adventureland-generational-films) • [19](https://www.cntraveller.com/gallery/mid90s-where-was-it-filmed) It arrived in 2018 alongside two other notable skating films, Crystal Moselle's *Skate Kitchen* and Bing Liu's Oscar-nominated documentary *Minding the Gap*, and reviewers compared all three; the Hollywood Reporter called Mid90s a gender-flipped sibling to *Skate Kitchen*, set in Los Angeles rather than New York.[20](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/critic-reviews/) • [21](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED605129.pdf) A scholarly article on 1990s skate media groups Mid90s with *Lords of Dogtown* (2005) and *All This Mayhem* (2014) as films giving skateboarding a cinematic treatment that invokes the era when it functioned as an immersive subculture offering participants meaning and collective identity.[22](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/11033088211057365)
## Reception
On Metacritic the film scored 66 out of 100, "generally favorable," based on 45 critic reviews, with 30 positive, 14 mixed, and 1 negative; its user score was 7.5.[2](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/) On Rotten Tomatoes it held an 81% Certified Fresh score.[5](https://www.flixster.com/movie/mid90s/7ad8d286-c42c-4d3a-ad4a-e9e3c22796b2/reviews/critic)
Positive reviews emphasized the film's observational naturalism. Variety's Owen Gleiberman wrote that it is "something smaller and purer: a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality," and RogerEbert.com's Matt Zoller Seitz called it "affecting, loose, sharply observed, emotional but not sentimental," faithful to the period without aggressive nostalgia.[20](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/critic-reviews/) • [23](https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/30-minute-on-mid-90s) The Guardian's Jordan Hoffman, by contrast, found the characters surface-level and the project phony, and the Los Angeles Times' Justin Chang called it "mildly charming, unapologetically derivative and naggingly fuzzy-headed," less satisfying than *Minding the Gap* or *Skate Kitchen*.[6](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/18/mid90s-review-jonah-hills-directorial-debut) • [4](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mid90s-review-20181018-story.html) The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday gave it two and a half stars, judging the 84-minute film "more of a fragment" that ends on a cheerfully liberated but unresolved note.[15](https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/jonah-hills-directorial-debut-is-a-sweet-and-authentic-coming-of-age-story-but-it-feels-like-he-forgot-to-finish-it/2018/10/24/b7280424-d493-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html?noredirect=on)
## References
1. [mid90s, A24](https://a24films.com/films/mid90s)
2. [Mid90s, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/)
3. [Mid90s press kit, Angel Films](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d442e3e4b0d06bf5f85305/t/5d10d36fdb9e920001d8d338/1561383794592/Mid90s_Presse%2BPRINT.pdf)
4. [Review: Jonah Hill's directing debut, 'Mid90s,' is a sweet but fuzzy-headed skater nostalgia trip, Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mid90s-review-20181018-story.html)
5. [Mid90s Critic Reviews, Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.flixster.com/movie/mid90s/7ad8d286-c42c-4d3a-ad4a-e9e3c22796b2/reviews/critic)
6. [Mid90s review, The Guardian (Jordan Hoffman)](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/18/mid90s-review-jonah-hills-directorial-debut)
7. [Review: 'Mid90s' is a Painstakingly Authentic Coming of Age Tale, UW Film Club](https://sites.uw.edu/film/2018/10/25/mid90sreview/)
8. [Review: Mid90s, Slant Magazine](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/mid90s/)
9. [TIFF 2018: Mid90s Review, That Shelf](https://thatshelf.com/tiff-2018-mid90s-review/)
10. [Mid90s study guide, Britfilms (Stefan Stiletto)](https://britfilms.de/assets/uploads/StudyGuides/BF13/mid90s_studyguide.pdf)
11. [Jonah Hill Faithfully Re-creates the Raw, Fleeting Years of Skate Culture, in "Mid90s", The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/jonah-hill-faithfully-re-creates-the-raw-fleeting-years-of-skate-culture-in-mid90s)
12. [Video Days: How Jonah Hill Got Skateboard Culture Right in 'Mid90s', The Ringer](https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/18/movies/jonah-hill-mid-90s-skate-video-toy-machine-interview)
13. ['Mid90s': Jonah Hill and Cast on Shooting in 4:3, the Casting Process, and More, Collider (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLVIdn8CYE)
14. [New York 2018 Interview: Jonah Hill Looks Back on MID90S, ScreenAnarchy](https://screenanarchy.com/2018/10/new-york-2018-interview-jonah-hill-looks-back-on-mid90s.html)
15. ['Mid90s' review, The Washington Post (Ann Hornaday)](https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/jonah-hills-directorial-debut-is-a-sweet-and-authentic-coming-of-age-story-but-it-feels-like-he-forgot-to-finish-it/2018/10/24/b7280424-d493-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html?noredirect=on)
16. [Decoding the sartorial magic of Jonah Hill's Mid90s, HUNGER](https://hungermag.com/editorial/decoding-the-sartorial-magic-of-jonah-hills-mid90s)
17. [Reviews, The Ithacan (November 8, 2018)](https://theithacan.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/11.08.18.pdf)
18. [Those Were the Days: How 'Mid90s' Makes Good on the Promise of Its Title, The Ringer](https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/19/movies/mid90s-jonah-hill-american-graffiti-dazed-confused-adventureland-generational-films)
19. [Mid90s: where was it filmed?, CN Traveller](https://www.cntraveller.com/gallery/mid90s-where-was-it-filmed)
20. [Mid90s critic reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/mid90s/critic-reviews/)
21. [Skateboarding film scholarship (ERIC ED605129)](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED605129.pdf)
22. [Thurnell-Read, T. (2022). 'A Couple of These Videos Is All You Really Needed to Get Pumped to Skate', Young 30(2)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/11033088211057365)
23. [30 Minutes on: "Mid90s", RogerEbert.com (Matt Zoller Seitz)](https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/30-minute-on-mid-90s)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2010 onward*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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