Movie Review: Minding the Gap

Minding the Gap (2018) **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Bing Liu.

 

It’s rare for any movie – maybe particularly a documentary – to sneak up on you and end up having a devastating impact on you. When Minding the Gap came out in 2018, I missed it – it played for a week in a theater near me, but I missed it then, and because it is a Hulu doc, it didn’t come to iTunes or other streaming platforms in Canada for a very long time (and it aired the same night as the Oscars on PBS Buffalo – and I missed it there as well). I certainly heard that this was the best documentary of the year – and yet, because I try to read as little as possible before seeing a film, I didn’t really know why. To me, it looked to be yet another skateboarding movie. Those can be good, surely, but how many GoPro shots of people skateboarding can you really watch before they become tiresome, boring and monotonous. When the film finally came to iTunes Canada last week, I jumped at the chance to see it because of that praise, but still, I don’t think I was prepared for what came next.

 

The documentary takes place in Rockford, Illinois – one of those stereotypical, sad American towns where the manufacturing jobs left – and then everything else did to. The people who stayed don’t have much money, don’t have good jobs, and don’t have very many prospects. The film concentrates on three different kids – Zack Mulligan, a white kid in his early 20s, Keire Johnson, an African American teenager a few years younger, and Bing Liu, who directed the film as well, an Asian American probably closer to Zack’s age. The film follows all three over the span of a year or two – and the changes they go through, and really dives into who each of the three of them were.

 

On the surface, these three – and the rest of the kids in the movie – don’t have all that much in common – with the exception of skateboarding. Al three of them don’t just like skateboarding – they love it. They love spending hours either in the skate park, or on the streets, working on their tricks – and when they aren’t doing that, they are hanging out at someone’s house, drinking beer, smoking pot, and acting like the young idiots they are. Is only gradually that you start to sense that all three of them are harboring some dark emotions – buried under all that young male bravado, are three young men who are hurting. The movie never comes out and states it, but it becomes clear that perhaps the reason all of them love skateboarding so much is because it allows them an escape – they need to get out of the house, and concentrate on something that isn’t their home life.

 

What emerges is a portrait of American life for the lower middle class, and the struggle of these young men to become adults, to define who they are in the world – a task made more difficult by strained relationships with parents, and a society who teaches young men to be tough – to bottle up their feelings, which only ever results in them exploding into anger and violence.

 

These changes come gradually. The maturation process is thrust upon Zack when he gets his girlfriend, Nina, pregnant – and they decide to have and raise the baby. Zack is all smiles, all charm and hope for the future with the camera in his face, but once the baby comes, he isn’t really able to complete that process. For her part, Nina is pretty much not given a choice – women never are – and must grow up and be a parent, even with a tough relationship with her own parents, although a supportive Aunt and Uncle show what a family can be. Zack likes to play the victim – which becomes harder to do when we start to find out from Nina some of the disturbing things going on when the cameras aren’t present. By the end of the film, Zack at least seems to grasp his mistakes, but you’re unsure if he can really correct them. Keire also had a hard relationship with his father – a carpenter who wanted to teach his son his trade, but Keire rebelled against that. What may seem like a typical story of teenage rebellion is harder because Keire’s father died before they could really patch things up – something that haunts him. For Bing, he only gradually reveals his own pain – an abusive stepfather, and a mother who feels a lot of regret for what happened. She is clearly uncomfortable being interviewed – but perhaps feels she owes it to her son to do it anyway. Keire’s mother isn’t much more comfortable at that either.

 

One of the producers of the film is Steve James – the director of many great documentaries, including Hoop Dreams, his masterpiece, and one of the best docs of all time. Minding the Gap is that rare documentary that really earns comparisons to Hoop Dreams. That film was about basketball, but not really. This film is about skateboarding – but not really. It’s about so much more than that – and is easily, one of the very best documentaries in recent years.