Curator Watchlist
A deeply personal, emotionally devastating documentary that uses skateboarding as both escape hatch and connective tissue. It’s as much about trauma, masculinity, class, and inherited pain as it is about youth culture, and it lands with unusual honesty and grace.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 33m
Director: Bing Liu
Starring: Keire Johnson, Zack Mulligan, Bing Liu
Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship.
Bing Liu
Keire Johnson, Zack Mulligan, Bing Liu
A deeply personal, emotionally devastating documentary that uses skateboarding as both escape hatch and connective tissue. It’s as much about trauma, masculinity, class, and inherited pain as it is about youth culture, and it lands with unusual honesty and grace.
Bing Liu turns a personal archive into something larger and more universal: a portrait of young men trying to grow up without a map. The skate footage gives the film motion and freedom, but the real subject is what happens when that freedom collides with unstable homes, class pressure, and unspoken damage.
What makes it so powerful is its emotional candor. The film never treats its subjects as symbols; it lets them be funny, guarded, vulnerable, and contradictory, often in the same scene. That honesty gives the documentary its ache, especially as the friendships begin to strain under revelations that can’t be ignored.
It’s one of those rare documentaries that feels simultaneously specific and generational. Even if you’ve never stepped on a board, the film understands how people use hobbies, friendships, and small rituals to survive what they can’t fix. The result is raw, compassionate, and quietly devastating.
demi adejuyigbe (5★) · 1716 likes
This is hands down the best documentary I’ve ever seen– and I’ll admit that I don’t watch them frequently, but it’s also one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages, and easily the most affecting film I’ve seen in a long, long time. Bing Liu made a beautiful, sobering Boyhood of his own life, about the trauma we adopt from our parents and our surroundings and how something as small as skateboarding can act as an escape from the
Matt Singer (4.5★) · 998 likes
Like most kids of my generation, I tried skateboarding. I had a buddy who had several boards and he always wanted to skate, so when I went over to his house I'd try it. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad, either. Still, it never took the way it does for some kids. I sometimes wondered why. This movie suggests a reason I had never considered before: I was fortunate enough not to have something to try to escape from.… more
demi adejuyigbe (5★) · 780 likes
As heartbreaking as it is life-affirming. Made me cry again. Just as struck with how affecting it is to see my own life reflected in these kids as I was the first time. Watched this with a new friend I've been skating with and we talked about how freeing it is to move through the world on wheels; it's not just a sport, it's a miracle. To glide over the ground like a bird– it's an affront to physics, a
Karsten (4.5★) · 528 likes
beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful
Ashlea 🖤 🐂 (4.5★) · 386 likes
I really hope these young men are doing well today. Keire has a beautiful soul.
A similarly patient coming-of-age portrait that watches ordinary life accumulate meaning over time.
Shares the empathy for working-class instability and the way childhood energy collides with adult precarity.
A skate-centered youth story with a strong sense of friendship, vulnerability, and emotional drift.
For its raw look at adolescence, peer bonds, and the chaos of youth without a safety net.
Captures restless young people searching for freedom while carrying deep instability with them.
A bruised character study about masculinity, self-worth, and the cost of clinging to a physical identity.
Emotionally direct and compassionate about trauma, survival, and the difficulty of moving forward.
A sharp, intimate portrait of a young person trapped by family dysfunction and limited options.
Explores masculinity, vulnerability, and the long shadow of formative pain with extraordinary sensitivity.
A grounded coming-of-age story about coping mechanisms, self-destruction, and emotional avoidance.
A deeply personal youth film about identity, family tension, and the need to claim a self.
A foundational coming-of-age film about alienation, rebellion, and the search for escape.
coming of age, trauma and inheritance, male friendship, working-class life, skateboarding as escape, family dysfunction, masculinity, self-documentation
coming-of-age, trauma, male friendship, skateboarding, working-class, Rust Belt, masculinity, family dysfunction, memoiristic, emotionally raw