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    Skateboarding Documentaries That Won’t Let You Bail

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    Skateboarding has long had something of an image problem. To outsiders, it can look like aimless mucking about on a plank with wheels, the preserve of teenagers loitering outside shopping centres with nowhere better to be.

    To anyone who has actually picked one up, however, it quickly becomes clear that there is a fair amount of skill, patience and sheer bloody-mindedness involved in landing even a basic trick.

    Over the past fifty-odd years, the sport has gone from a 1970s sidewalk pastime to an Olympic discipline, whilst still managing to hold on to a culture that is very much its own.

    The films on this list pick up at different points along skateboarding’s journey, from the empty swimming pools of Venice Beach to the half-pipes of HBO. Some are about the tricks. Most are really about the people doing them:

    Dogtown and Z-Boys

    If there is a single film that explains how skateboarding became skateboarding, it is this one. Directed by Stacy Peralta and narrated by Sean Penn, Dogtown and Z-Boys takes the viewer back to the rough end of 1970s Santa Monica, where a group of teenage surfers found themselves with nowhere to ride when the tide went out and started ‘surfing’ on tarmac instead.

    The Zephyr Skate Team, or Z-Boys, included names that any self-respecting skater knows, such as Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Peralta himself. When a Californian drought left the swimming pools of the rich and famous standing empty, the boys started sneaking in and treating the curved walls as makeshift waves.

    Modern vertical skating was, more or less, invented on the spot. The film won both the Audience Award and the Directing Award at Sundance in 2001, which gives you some sense of how unusual it was at the time for a sports documentary to crack mainstream cinema.

    The archive footage Peralta dug up is the heart of the film, with grainy clips of teenagers doing things on borrowed concrete that simply hadn’t been done before. What gives the film its weight is the honesty of the interviews. The Z-Boys were not saints and the success that followed was uneven, with a few of those involved not enjoying happy endings. Peralta does not flinch from any of that.

    Bones Brigade: An Autobiography

    Stacy Peralta is back behind the camera for this one too. Given his own role in the events being described, you would be forgiven for thinking it might be a vanity project. It is not. Bones Brigade looks at the skateboarding team that Peralta and George Powell put together in the early 1980s, made up of a group of slightly awkward teenagers who went on to become the most dominant names in the sport.

    The line-up is absurd in retrospect: Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, Mike McGill and Tommy Guerrero, most of them barely out of school, went on to become some of the biggest names to ever skate.

    The film leans heavily on first-person interviews shot decades later, with the now middle-aged riders talking openly about insecurity, bullying, money worries and the relentless pressure of being expected to invent new tricks on demand. Mullen in particular is a revelation, holding forth on the inner life of a street skater in a way few people had heard before.

    Peralta gave an interview to ESPN ahead of the film’s 2012 release that gives a fair sense of why he wanted to make it. There is footage of the original Bones Brigade videos that made the team famous in the 1980s, when VHS tapes of skating were passed around like contraband.

    Minding the Gap

    Of all the films on this list, Minding the Gap is the one most likely to catch you off guard. Bing Liu spent twelve years filming his two best friends, Zack and Keire, growing up in Rockford, Illinois, with skateboarding as the thing that bound them together. What appears at first to be a coming-of-age story about three young men and their boards turns into something altogether much harder.

    The film deals with domestic violence, race, fatherhood and the way that boys raised in unhappy homes can grow up to repeat the patterns they were running from. Liu makes himself part of the story, eventually turning the camera on his own mother.

    Minding the Gap Documentary

    It is also, on the side, a properly beautiful piece of skating footage. Liu was a skater himself before he was a filmmaker and the way the camera follows his friends through the empty car parks of Rockford gives the film a particular kind of energy that more polished documentaries can’t quite match.

    Liu spoke to Dazed about how he came to make a skate film about real trauma and the interview is worth reading alongside the film. That balance is what earned it an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 2019, along with a Peabody. Worth watching even if the only thing you know about skateboarding is what one is.

    All This Mayhem

    If Bones Brigade is the polite version of skating’s coming-of-age story, All This Mayhem is the version with the swear words left in. Directed by Eddie Martin and made under the Vice Films banner, the 2014 documentary tells the story of Tas and Ben Pappas, two brothers from the Melbourne suburbs who briefly held the top two world rankings in vert skating in the mid-1990s, before the whole thing came apart.

    The Pappases were not the easiest company. They drank, they fought, they made enemies of just about everyone in the American skate scene and they had a particularly noisy rivalry with Tony Hawk that the film makes no attempt to soften.

    All This Mayhem

    Drugs followed, then prison and Ben Pappas did not live to see the film made. Tas, who carries most of the on-camera interviews, is candid in a way that makes a few moments genuinely uncomfortable to watch. He is not asking for sympathy, but he is also not pretending it all turned out fine.

    What makes the film more than a straight rise-and-fall yarn is the footage of the brothers actually skating, which is jaw-dropping. The thought of how much further they might have gone, had they wanted it differently, is part of what gives it its sting. It would be a lie to say that this film is made objectively, but it is all the more fascinating for that.

    Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off

    Even if you know nothing of skateboarding, you’ve probably heard of Tony Hawk. There is a generation of British thirty-somethings whose first encounter with the sport came via a PlayStation controller and a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. This 2022 HBO documentary, directed by Sam Jones, is partly about how that happened and partly about the man whose name was on the box.

    The opening sequence is built around Hawk, then in his early fifties, attempting to land a 900 for what may be the last time. He has done it before, more than once, including the first ever at the 1999 X Games, but his body is no longer entirely on board.

    Hawk himself is a strange subject for a documentary, in that he is famously reserved and reluctant to make a fuss about anything. Jones works around this by relying heavily on the people in his orbit, including ex-wives, the wider Bones Brigade crew and a few peers who are quite cheerfully unkind about him.

    What lingers is the perfectionism and the question Jones keeps circling: why a man of Hawk’s age and bank balance keeps choosing to throw himself down a vert ramp at all. The answer is not a clean one, if for no other reason than the film does well to explore what makes the man who became a brand more than a skateboarder.

    Waiting for Lightning

    The image at the heart of this 2012 film is one of the more improbable in skating history. In 2005, Danny Way built a 70-foot megaramp over a section of the Great Wall of China and jumped it on a skateboard, becoming the first person to do so. Even more impressively, he did it with a broken foot, having wiped out on a practice run the day before.

    Director Jacob Rosenberg builds the film around that single stunt whilst filling in the rest of Way’s life, which turns out to be the more interesting half. Way grew up in southern California with an absent father, a brother who introduced him to the sport and later died young and a body that had already taken a punishing amount of damage by his teenage years.

    There is plenty for the skating purists to enjoy in Waiting for Lightning. Way is credited with inventing the megaramp itself and pushing the discipline of ‘big air’ well beyond what anyone thought was physically advisable. The Great Wall jump is presented as the kind of thing Way was always going to attempt, rather than a one-off publicity stunt, and the film is at its best when it sits with the question of why anyone chooses a life that demands quite that level of pain.

    It is the footage of Way that is the star of the show here, from jumping out of a helicopter onto a ramp through to overseeing the building of the ramp for the Great Wall stunt.

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