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Entertainment

'Skate Kitchen' is the Perfect Film About Loneliness (and Skateboarding)

Crystal Moselle's narrative debut about an all-girl skate collective draws a line in the sand for a genre that tends to frame the sport as an emotional outlet for men.
Emma Garland
London, GB
All stills from Skate Kitchen

Skate Kitchen is, ostensibly, a film about skateboarding. Based on and starring a real New York skate collective of the same name, it’s a millennial reboot of Kids with less smack and more fallouts on Instagram. But while skate culture drives the plot of the film – making it Crystal Moselle’s narrative debut following her 2015 documentary, The Wolfpack – it is, at heart, an intimate meditation on female relationships.

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The story follows Camille, an outcast living in Long Island with her mother. Played by Rachelle Vinberg, Camille is an obviously lonely teenager. In the opening scene she credit cards herself (when you mess up a trick and the deck hits you between the legs) skating in her neighbourhood with a group of boys who, instead of helping, mistake the blood running down her leg for her period and make jokes. Her mother is out a lot, she spends most of her birthday skating alone, and fritters away the evenings lying in bed scrolling through Instagram. It’s there she discovers Skate Kitchen – a group of girls who upload videos of themselves doing tricks and joking around in lower Manhattan. One day they advertise a meet-up at a skatepark and Camille decides to go into the city, where she befriends Janay (Dede Lovelace), Kurt (Nina Moran), Ruby (Kabrina Adams), Indigo (Ajani Russell), Eliza (Jules Lorenzo) and Quinn (Brenn Lorenzo). She’s awkward around them at first, not quite knowing how or where to insert herself into their close-knit dynamic. But, as she settles in, the sense of her world expanding becomes palpable.

Scenes show the girls gassing each other up, talking about their sexualities, questioning whether their vaginas are “normal” looking, and debunking myths about toxic shock syndrome. In dreamlike sequences, they scale fences, weave between cars down busy avenues and push back against boys who won’t let them drop in. When Camille falls out with her mother, Janay and her father let her crash at their apartment no questions asked.

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It’s every loner’s dream: candid conversations taking place within the secrecy of a girl’s bedroom. Their deliberate rule-breaking, cultural or otherwise, is a manifestation of a longing for rebellion that every awkward teen (and repressed adult) will experience at some point. Through close relationships, you get the sense of Camille’s world opening up.

The film’s tension is driven by the gender norms that begin to assert themselves around puberty. Having not yet been exposed to the same aggressions and disappointments as the rest of the girls, Camille doesn’t understand why it’s a problem for her to go skating with a rival crew of boys as well. Her fallout with them over a mutual love interest, Devon (Jaden Smith), leads to a new kind of isolation as she becomes the only girl within a group of teenage boys who inherently don’t consider her as their equal. In their company Camille sits in silence, visibly uncomfortable as they brag about their sexual conquests. She pretends to sleep when they watch porn with the volume all the way up in the living room, and is dismissed until she’s able to prove herself – and even then her presence is merely accepted. When things with Devon take a hurtful turn, she runs home to her mother – a poignant decision considering that she chose to live with her dad after her parents’ divorce, but changed her mind when she hit puberty because there were things he didn’t or couldn’t understand about what was happening to her. She needed to be around someone who did.

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Zipping around the city at night, antagonising security guards and landing ollies on top of high-rise buildings – these scenes with the boys arguably have more in common with previous skate films like Kids, Thrashin’, Lords of Dogtown, Grind, Paranoid Park and Jonah Hill’s impending coming of age skate film, Mid90s. All of those films frame skating as a refuge for outcasts, but mostly centre on straight boys with troubled background for whom skating acts as the bonding agent of a friendship group standing in for a family. Just like the music subcultures of hardcore punk or hip-hop that it’s usually twinned with, skating is seen primarily as an emotional outlet for men.

Skate Kitchen kicks back against that, challenging the double standards of a subculture built on ‘outcasts’ that continues to uphold exclusionary attitudes of its own. The Skate Kitchen crew – all girls, most of whom are women of colour, whose associates are also either women, people of colour or present as queer – represent a revolutionary impulse that’s perhaps been missing from similar films centred on male bonding.

But one of Skate Kitchen’s main virtues is the fact that it spends more time celebrating each character’s relationship to skating, regardless of identity, than it does pitting them against each other, highlighting the absurdity of those existing hierarchies in the first place. It centres teenage girls, but doesn’t patronise them through a reductive “girl boss” lens. They fuck, they fight, they shred (Kurt’s first line in the film is “Janay! That girl just fingered me in the bushes, bro!”), but they’re not trying to fit in with a boy’s club mentality. During a Q&A after the BFI preview screening in London last month, Moselle was asked what the best feedback she’d received about the film so far was. She replied saying it was from a boy who claimed it was the first film he’d ever seen that made him want to be a girl.

Released in the UK at the end of September, Skate Kitchen has so far been met with mixed reviews. The Telegraph called it this year’s best coming of age movie, while Guardian said it was a “half-baked” story that would’ve worked better as the documentary it was originally intended to be. It’s a niche story, really – a close look at the margins of a subculture that, despite being a billion-dollar industry today, is still largely considered on cultural terms as “a conservative anti-drug”. But the feeling of isolation that Camille expresses is a familiar one, particularly for young women whose interests mean spending a lot of time in male-dominated spaces. “For a while I was feeling really lonely,” Camille discloses to the group after they’ve become close enough for her to start opening up, “That loneliness you have even in a crowded room”.

Incidentally, Moselle met the real Skate Kitchen girls after overhearing them talking about tampons on the subway – a moment that’s nodded to in a scene that sees the girls heading home on the train with their boards, talking about rape culture. If you want to get poetic about it you could view the film as being rooted in the act of vocalising experiences that are usually shoved aside. It cultivates a sense of romance through the feeling of victory you get when you finally find your space within conditions that otherwise suck. In that sense, Skate Kitchen really isn’t that different from skate films of the past. Only this time, it’s girls doing it.

@emmaggarland