‘Only the Young’: Kids Find Themselves

Skye, Garrison, and Kevin live in Canyon County, California. Here they observe adults, look for distractions, and find themselves. Skaters and rebels, smart kids and members of the Ignition Skate ministry, they’re romantics, too. They have a sense of a future that has little and also everything to do with their present, life in a small town where houses are flat and horizons limited. With the filmmakers of the documentary Only the Young, the kids both share and shape their experiences. The film, screening at the Doc Yard 28 January, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jason Tippet, is a collaboration as much as it is a revelation, and in that, it pushes the edges of documentary and fiction, articulating both realities and fantasies, feelings and fears. Tracking the teenagers over a few months, the film is remarkably composed, full of poetic images of skate ramps and shadows framing the boys’ lithe, athletic crouches. In their bedrooms, where they build models of the ramps, they keep their boards close, balanced across their long white legs as they imagine what’s coming next.

See PopMatters‘ review.