A Souped -Up Ride With the Sk8te Boys of Summer

Rating: 8/10 (4 June 2005)

"Lords of Dogtown" is a rollicking companion piece to Stacy Peralta's documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" about the very young men who transformed skateboarding into a commercial extreme sport.
Director Catherine Hardwicke has a marvelous, visual instinct for capturing the lightning in a bottle that is the energy of adolescence, as she demonstrated with teenage girls in "Thirteen." While the actors are actually a few years older than the founders of the movement, astoundingly, were, they explode with adolescent fidgeting on the screen that then channels hormonal and emotional frustrations into constant movement on first surfboards then skateboards.
This film fills in many of the gaps in their personal lives that were frustratingly missing from the documentary, with evident artistic license as some characters are composites. Some rough edges are left out or smoothed over to keep it from the usual sex, bad contracts and rock 'n' roll biographies.
I had no idea that suburban-sweet little Emile Hirsch from "Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys" and "Imaginary Heroes" was a Venice Beach sk8ter boy in his real life, albeit New School, so that he could so naturally embody the lithe, rebellious Jay Adams, who starts from and rolls to darker places than his cohorts.
Brought much more to the fore is Tony Alva's Chicano family and Victor Rasuk shows that as in "Raising Victor Vargas" he can passionately portray youthfulness and growing into maturity.
Screenwriter Peralta may be a bit self-serving in how he lets his almost too nice younger self be so sunnily portrayed by John Robinson as the very image of a Southern California beach boy, but an incongruously responsible one -- he actually wears a watch to get to a real job. We learn even less here about his background than any of the other kids.
Heath Ledger transforms himself into a stoner surfer Fagin, revealing better than the documentary the rise and collapse of the odd mentoring relationship the sponsor of the Zephyr Team created with boys who needed some kind of father figure in their lives.
The restless, jangly cinematography races after them like a helmet-cam from the opening shots, on land, sea and especially in empty swimming pools, soaking up their vibes and momentum with quick editing.
While this is more a clear-eyed cautionary ode to too-much too-fast adolescence than to testosterone, the women in their lives are given only a little more acknowledgment than in the documentary. Rebecca De Mornay, who started her career as a teen boy's lust object in "Risky Business," ironically now plays Jay's unstable mom, but she is not drawn as substantively as the similar mom in "Thirteen."
Just as most rockers admit that they first slapped on a guitar to get chicks, this film is up front that the boys attracted groupies, and makes a half-hearted effort to personalize a couple of the young women for whom they compete, or maybe Nikki Reed is just miscast as Alva's sister. Even the concluding scroll about their futures, much more upbeat than in the documentary, leaves out their detritus of the women in their lives.
The re-created settings and production design of the notorious Pacific Ocean Park Pier well illustrate the class differences between these outlaw locals vs. beach blanket surfer movies and the owners of those prized pools.
The period music is mostly used just for atmosphere, from the opening riffs of Jimi Hendrix's guitar, but occasionally hits home with a character's mood, particularly Neil Young's "Old Man" and Rod Stewart's "Maggie May." The hair styles, clothes and make-up are also much better done, including the wigs, than most '70's period movies, though why cover up the countless bruises the cast suffered, as presumably in real life the guys must have been banged up besides the one incident shown.
Stay through all the credits to see clips of the real folks, including a sweet tribute to Jay as the font of the style.