Hardcore skating buffs will likely embrace Dogtown's entire package of mythology -- the notion that a ragtag band of thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds from the wrong side of the tracks turned themselves not just into athletes but romantic urban guerillas who rolled gleefully through a brave new world of rules and regs and inspired a new youth culture in the process. They will like narrator Sean Penn's pronouncements about "the beginning of a revolution." The buffs may also pay heed to skateboarding's resident philosopher and sociologist (and Dogtown co-writer), Craig Stecyk, when he goes on about how a "kiddie fad" evolved into a "cultural aesthetic" and how skaters "used the handiwork of the government-corporate structure in ways the architects never imagined."
Apart from Dogtown's steady stream of hyperbole, there are some other messages the nostalgia-clouded moviemaker may not even be aware of. A quarter-century after inventing the "vertical" style of skateboarding that every ten-year-old in Keokuk now sees on the X-Games telecasts, the aging and none-too-articulate Z-Boys tell the camera what tough guys and uncompromising individualists they all were and how they achieved something like rock-star status not just in "Dogtown," a stretch of three seedy LA beach communities, but all over the world. When you hear the proud defiance in their words and see the hard mileage on their faces, you can't help considering the tolls exacted by fleeting minor-league celebrity and the American reluctance to grow up. With its grainy home-movie footage from the '70s and its elegiac air, this documentary wants us to fondly remember a certain shining moment. But, as a wise man once said about baseball, "only the game stays young," and the untidy present days of Peralta's faded heroes keep intruding on the reluctant documentarian, who is clearly focused on idealizing the way things were.
Tony Alva, called "the Chuck Berry of skateboarding," is still doing skate demos and sneaking into people's backyards to ride their swimming pools; baby-faced Jay Adams, "the original seed the sport sprouted from," according to writer Stecyk, is serving time in a Hawaiian jail on a drug conviction, and the nasty scar parenthesizing his right eye speaks of hard times. Former Z-Boy Chris Cahill, a closing title informs us, "was last seen in Mexico."
Moviemaker Peralta, who at nineteen capitalized on the skateboarding boom with advertising deals and, eventually, his own manufacturing and video-making company, is no more immune to his own mythologizing than the others. He interviews himself at some length during the course of Dogtown, enthusiastically repeating the Z-Boy party line about their outlaw ways and peerless creativity. We expect some depth and perspective from filmmakers, but even in talking about the movie Peralta sounds like an former high-school quarterback who never got over the big game or an old campus revolutionary who's never glimpsed the folly that went along with the fervor: "The older you get, the more real it feels," he says of the Z-Boys era, "because you realize you don't get many moments in life that are that pure."
True; for better or worse, it's called growing up. Peralta's mythmaking could have used some informed, adult hindsight: Even the skate-crazy fourteen-year-olds in the house might have appreciated it.
