First released in 2021, Kid 90 is a documentary about what it’s like to be rich, famous, and young. Apparently, it sucks. The time that it sucks the most is when you’re no longer a teenager and you’re looking back on on your past and trying to somehow shape it all into a coherent narrative.
The documentary was produced, directed, and written by Soleil Moon Frye, a former child actress who originally found fame in the early 80s as the star of a sitcom called Punky Brewster. That show was a bit before my time but I do remember seeing her on that episode of Saved By The Bell where she pretended to like Screech for his spaghetti sauce money. She’s also appeared in a few horror films, many of whom have found a second life in the streaming era. The daughter of actor Virgil Frye (he was the creepy in security guard in Herb Freed’s Graduation Day), Soleil apparently started carrying a video camera around at a young age and was constantly filming her friends, who included people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Mark Wahlberg, David Arquette, Stephen Dorff, the skaters who appeared in Larry Clark’s Kids, and a host of others. She also saved all of her diaries and her voicemails. Kid 90 was assembled from those artifacts. Soleil tells her story while discussing the pressures of being a young woman in Hollywood and being objectified when she was barely old enough to be considered a teenager. She talks about drugs, sex, her friends who died young, and the unique trauma of growing up while the entire world watches and judges. She talks about a relationship with an older man, who she doesn’t name even while pictures of her with Charlie Sheen appear on the screen. What she doesn’t do is go into too much detail.
Indeed, while watching Kid 90, the main thing that struck me was how guarded everyone seemed to be, even in the candid footage that was shot when they were all teens. Young Soleil asks her friends about their philosophy of life and none of them can come up with anything particularly interesting. Instead, they all sound like their reading from a script that was handed to them by a publicist. The voicemails that we hear are largely generic and uninteresting and, if not for the title card that accompanies each one, we would have no idea who was talking. (There’s only so much meaning that one can wring out of, “Hey, just calling to see if you were around.”) Yes, Leonard DiCaprio appears in a clip or two but DiCaprio also served as a producer on the film so you can be sure that those clips were very carefully selected. In the present, a handful of actors talk about the process of going from being teen actors to adults. Brian Austin Green talks about the first time that he realized that there were people who did not like him. (His shock about the failure of his rap career is actually kind of poignant.) David Arquette is goofy but honest when discussing his history of drug abuse. Stephen Dorff is thoughtful. Mark-Paul Gosselaar is likable but obviously careful about saying anything that could come back to haunt him. (I’ve never seen Gosselaar give a bad interview, largely because he’s a master of revealing just enough without revealing too much.) And then you’ve got poor Soleil, who struggles to assign some sort of bigger meaning to her youthful memories. She obviously doesn’t want to be known as just another spoiled child actress but, when she shares footage of herself hanging out with a bunch of New York skaters, it’s hard not to see her as being anything other than a rich kid slumming.
(Not that’s anything wrong with that! I did plenty of slumming when I was in college.)
In the end, Kid 90 is really about the innate human desire to take all of the random events of our life and shape them into some sort of grand narrative. Unfortunately, life is never really that easy to explain or categorize. No one in the film, Soleil included, really lets their guard down. I can’t say that I blame them.
