Soleil Moon Frye’s look back at her life as a child star in the 1990s walks the thin line between diary and documentary.
At the heart of Soleil Moon Frye’s new film, “Kid 90” (streaming on Hulu), is a startling drive for self-documentation. Beginning in her early teens, Moon Frye, who starred on the popular children’s show “Punky Brewster,” began recording her life with a video camera. She seems to have taken her camcorder everywhere: film sets, road trips, parties with fellow child stars, even her breast reduction surgery at age 15. When she didn’t film something, she recorded her reflections on audiotape or in her journal with precocious introspectiveness.
In “Kid 90,” Moon Frye revisits this material after nearly two decades, walking the thin line between diary and documentary. Her home videos offer a charming portrait of celebrity right before the boom of paparazzi and social media, when being confronted with a camera didn’t yet elicit caution or studied posturing from the young and famous. Moon Frye’s ebullience brought together a vibrant circle of peers: Brian Austin Green, David Arquette, Justin Pierce, Leonardo di Caprio and many others appear in the film. They’re endearingly unselfconscious and, dare I say, normal — just kids exploring friendship, romance and the confusions of coming-of-age.
If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film. In interviews, Moon Frye hints at the darker aspects of young womanhood and celebrity that creep at the edges of her frame: sexual abuse, drug addiction, mental illness. But the director is too enamored of the pixelated, lo-fi nostalgia of her celluloid memories — and too intent on crafting a rose-tinted arc of “self-love” — to dig deeper into these themes. The result is a film poised rather uncertainly between the personal and the cultural.
Kid 90
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. Watch on Hulu.
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March 11, 2021 at 07:00PM
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‘Kid 90’ Review: Celluloid Dreams - The New York Times
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