Nothing in the basic narrative that Moselle and co-writers Aslihan Unaldi and Jennifer Sullivan have cooked up here is particularly groundbreaking, but the film’s real attraction is the entirely believable interplay between these young women, whether they’re watching each other land heel-flips, making trouble around town, or bantering half-stoned about tampons. The Skate Kitchen girls have nebulously antagonistic relationships with the various male crews who share their territories, and Janay has a particularly knotty history with Devon, but Camille sees something in him, and begins taking surreptitious excursions with his crew on the side. She winds up crashing with Janay and taking a job at a local bodega, where she meets a fellow skater and aspiring photographer who works in the stockroom, Devon (Smith). It isn’t long before Camille’s mom discovers she isn’t actually spending her afternoons at the library and kicks her out. Shy, and impossibly naïve next to these tough-as-nails Downtown types, she nonetheless learns how to navigate the dynamics and the slang of her new gang, and becomes fast friends with the warm, welcoming Janay (Dede Lovelace) and the brash, pugilistic Kurt (scene-stealer Nina Moran). Itching to break out, she happens upon some skilled skater girls on Instagram, and takes them up on an invitation to sneak out to Manhattan for a skate date. Even adding a scion of Hollywood royalty to the cast does nothing to puncture the film’s low-key verisimilitude – supporting player Jaden Smith seems to be taking his cues from his nonpro costars, rather than the other way around.įounding Skate Kitchen member Rachelle Vinberg takes on the starring role here as Camille, a Long Island 18-year-old living rather unhappily with her mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who forces her to give up skateboarding after a bad fall. “Skate Kitchen” will surely do wonders for the titular crew’s notoriety, but what’s most impressive is how well each of these first-time actors manage to retain their own personalities while stepping up to the challenge of carrying a whole film. Moselle met the film’s core cast after a chance encounter on a train, and previously enlisted them for a Miu Miu-commissioned short film – since then, the group has begun to make waves beyond skate culture, starring in various magazine spreads and a Nike campaign. “Skate Kitchen” has plenty to say about the lengths to which young women must go to clear out a little breathing room in testosterone-heavy spaces, but it is first and foremost an irresistible hangout movie, offering a thoroughly millennial, vérité spin on ’80s skater classics like “Thrashin’.” Given the proper handling, it could land nicely. And though she’s given each skater a character to play and a fictional arc to play out, Moselle seems just as eager to let these young women be themselves as she was with “The Wolfpack’s” Angulo brothers. The last time Crystal Moselle brought a film to Sundance, she won the 2015 festival’s jury prize for her stranger-than-fiction documentary study of seven cinema-obsessed, shut-in Manhattan siblings, “The Wolfpack.” Back in Park City with her first narrative feature, Moselle has uncovered yet another inimitable group of real-life New York youngsters, this one a posse of female skateboarders who haunt Lower East Side parks under the name Skate Kitchen.
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