Entertainment

‘Only The Young’ review

‘children are the gods of this city,” the teenage Garrison observes. His city is Santa Clarita, Calif., shown here as an empty, echoing playground of boarded-up houses and foreclosure signs. Teen children are the gods of this slight, sweet documentary, too, their aimless amusements and musings shown in minute detail while the adults stay where they belong, offstage.

School and work barely register. Instead, we follow the kids as they skateboard off roofs and make disarmingly frank remarks (such as a girl who describes her kind-of beau as “so sensitive, and . . . [pause] dumb. They’re all dumb.”).

The three main subjects are Garrison, his somewhat more troubled friend Kevin, and Skye, a girl who was abandoned by her parents and raised by her grandparents. The film thwarts any pat expectations you might glean from the town’s bad economy and these checkered backgrounds. The teenagers are refreshingly gentle and clean-living; they don’t drink, they don’t swear and they certainly aren’t having sex. All three are religious, a fact that is neither emphasized nor underplayed.

Despite the short length, the “going together” and “breaking up” does get wearying, given that such matters are completely obvious to teens and as abstract as quantum physics to adults. Directors Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet let their subjects meander, and instead unify their movie through tight control of tone, winding up with an elegiac portrait of teen America.