‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’: The best movie ever made about skateboarding?
Skateboarding has appeared in plenty of movies over the years, but not often does it serve as the backdrop to an entire feature. When it does, whether it’s narrative or documentary, the evidence is there that it’s a reliable source of dramatic tension, personal progression, and celebration of the human spirit.
From Marty McFly racing around Hill Valley in Back to the Future to Gus Van Sant’s coming-of-age drama Polaroid Park via Crystal Moselle’s acclaimed Skate Kitchen and Josh Brolin’s first starring role in the overpoweringly ’80s Thrashin’, there’s plenty of worthwhile skateboarding in cinema.
Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap may have earned a ‘Best Documentary Feature’ nomination at the Academy Awards for chronicling how three friends unite over their shared love of skateboarding, but it didn’t speak to a specific – and ultimately massively influential – moment in cultural history in the same way Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys did.
The co-writer and director was the highest-ranked professional skateboarder in the sport before he’d even turned 20 years old, so he was keenly aware of how quickly things took off after it snowballed from a backyard pastime into a cultural sensation, with the Sean Penn-narrated doc detailing the evolution and subsequent explosion in popularity that all started with surf shop owners Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom, and Craig Stecyk.
The trio formed the Zephyr Skateboard Team – the titular Z-Boys – alongside local teenagers seeking an outlet for their energy, with surfer culture strongly influencing the way a small group of outsiders from Los Angeles would become pioneers by infusing surfing and skating to create new, exciting, daring, and often dangerous new tricks and techniques.
In the midst of a drought that reduced the waves to a standstill and dried up swimming pools all over the city, the youthful exuberance displayed by 11 original members of the Z-Boys team is on full display, with the carefree youngsters having no idea they’d be setting the stage for a rise in prominence for skateboarding that culminated in its acceptance as an Olympic sport.
The combination of archival footage and period-accurate soundtrack evokes a feeling that speaks to not only the freewheeling nature of teenage life in 1970s Los Angeles, but also the way these kids rocketed to prominence to become local celebrities and something approximating rockstars, all born from their desire to flat-out refuse the notion of allowing boredom to set in when there was an unmarked trail waiting to be blazed.
These guys had no idea they were ushering in a revolution when they first started, but the success and mainstream popularity of skateboarding began with them. It’s an engrossing look at a critical moment that nobody seemed to realise was an important moment at the time, and yet the history of the Z-Boys proved so popular that Peralta ended up adapting it into the narrative feature Lords of Dogtown just four years after its 2001 bow, which fell short of its predecessor because it lacked the inimitable authenticity of the documentary.
