The young heroes who make up Lords of Dogtown find themselves unexpectedly at the heart of one of pop culture's most enduring themes: the inevitable clash between success and authenticity. How do you keep it real and get paid at the same time?
The movie, inspired by real events, takes us into a rough neighborhood in Venice, California, called Dogtown and shows us the birth of modern skateboarding. The trio of skateboarders, Stacy (John Robinson), Tony (Victor Rasuk) and Jay (Emile Hirsch), turn empty swimming pools into skate bowls, kick start a new industry, become (somewhat) famous and inevitably, watch their friendships deteriorate.
As a would-be documentary, the film is occasionally gripping, taking us deep inside the exuberant surf and skate culture of Venice—amid the cars and surfboards, the Jethro Tull T-shirts, the weed and beer, one senses a weird sort of kinship with the '50s youth culture of Grease. Only here it's not a new motor that sets hearts aflutter, but the super-grip capabilities of urethane skateboard wheels.
As drama, though, the film lacks, well, grip. Scenes lazily meander into one another. Loud parties (and there are lots of them) end in pointless fisticuffs. There's no sense of gathering tension and peripheral characters, like Jay's equilibrium-challenged brother, Sid, or their mom (a weather-beaten Rebecca DeMornay), drift in and out. The various girlfriends and groupies are all basically interchangeable.
As for the three leads, Stacy starts off as the earnest straight-arrow, becomes a sort of wan sellout (unlike the more committed glory-chasing of his buddy Tony), and by the end, just strikes us as nice and bland. Only Hirsch's Jay Adams really grabs us. Of course, he's the authentic one, the one perfecting his art while the others grab the spotlight. There's a competition in the end, and Adams tries to pull off a never-before-seen move. He fails and is given a lower score than the easier tricks performed by his friends. But there's no sense from Tony or Stacy that they even saw the new trick. Given that the film was written by the real-life Stacy Peralta, you'd think he would have chiseled out a stronger drama among the boys, or dictated his story to someone who could.