As much as the awards-season conversation has been dominated by Netflix (for Roma) and amazon (for several TV series, including the very good Homecoming), Hulu has quietly had a banner year as well by moving into documentaries, with two of its properties making the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. One of them, Minding the Gap, seems like a lock for a nomination given its universal acclaim and the timeliness of its subject, exploring the lives of three young men in Rockford, Illinois, all skateboarders and all products of traumatic childhoods.
Bing Liu is the filmmaker and one of the three subjects, having begun filming his friends as they skateboarded around Rockford as preteens and continued it in his early 20s (Liu is 24 now) with both interview footage and scenes from their daily lives. The two other main subjects are Zack Milligan, a handsome, volatile kid of 21 or 22 who now has a son with his 18-year-old girlfriend Nina (also a product of a violent home); and Keire Johnson, an African-American kid who can pile systemic and tacit racism on top of the challenges he already faced from a traumatic upbringing. The three men all respond to the challenges of their lives in different ways, notably Zack, who has become a physically and emotionally abusive partner to Nina and even tries to manipulate their depictions on camera by playing an audio recording of Nina screaming at him without explaining that it was preceded by him physically assaulting her.
As the story progresses, the details of the family lives of all four of these young adults become clear – three grew up in physically abusive environments; Keire lost his father at a young age, while Bing only saw his father three times since age 5. Zack’s childhood is the most opaque, even though he really never shuts up while he’s on camera, and is blessed or cursed with good looks (he reminds me of the ’90s actor Jeremy London) and a self-confidence that convinces him he’s smarter than he really is, which becomes very apparent in a soliloquy later in the film where he justifies his own bad choices by calling people who choose a predictable family life as ‘weak.’ He’s damaged, as all four of the principals (including Nina) are, but he’s also doing the least to cope with it, self-medicating, lashing out physically and emotionally, and stringing Nina along until she finally takes him to court for child support.
The appeal of Minding the Gap is how raw it is, including the footage Liu shot ten years earlier, as well his decision to insert his own story into a narrative that also includes other people. Documentaries seem to follow the either/or path: it’s about your own story (Strong Island) or it’s about someone else’s, but not both. Liu’s history of abuse comes out later in the film, but the arc of his life, including his use of skateboarding as an escape from a bad home situation, dovetails perfectly with those of his friends. And while Liu is occasionally heard interviewing subjects, he’s as unobtrusive in that role as he could be.
Where the film falters is around the three men themselves. Keire and Bing are compelling and sympathetic, but also both reserved by nature, and there’s often a feeling that they’re not revealing as much to the camera as the audience might need to hear from them – especially Keire, who has a mischievous smile he puts on every time he’s lost in thought, even if the thought is unpleasant. Zack, meanwhile, comes off as a real asshole – granted, one with trauma in his own past, someone who probably needs real treatment for PTSD and other mental health issues, but his treatment of Nina and general disregard for others around him is hard to accept even with Bing essentially vouching for his buddy by including his story. He also seems to have a knack for finding women he can manipulate, which comes off particularly poorly as Bing gets Nina’s back story of a horrendous childhood and lack of any kind of family structure until her aunt and uncle take her into their house when she’s 21 and has a 3-year-old in tow.
I personally found the domestic scenes between Zack and Nina excruciating to watch because he is just awful – awful to her, and awful in the way a child trying to act like an adult can be awful. There’s a sense here that Liu is still finding his voice as a documentarian, that he had great material and stumbled on a tremendous subject, but has to learn more about assembling what he collects into a coherent narrative or series of them. Minding the Gap has garnered incredible acclaim to date, with 62 positive reviews for a 100% rating on RottenTomatoes, and the Best Documentary Feature award may come down to this versus Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but I didn’t see it in quite that light. It’s a strong debut that might be the harbinger of a great career for Liu, but it’s also flawed and didn’t do enough to grab and hold my attention throughout its tapestry of three stories.