Skate Kitchen is Moselle’s first feature, and she based the movie’s story on her young stars’ own lives. The movie sometimes feels like a photonegative version of Kids: wholesome in the manner of Rookie magazine, genuinely positive, and, while not naïve, innocent. Moselle’s first film was The Wolfpack, a documentary about brothers growing up in New York with a father who rarely let them outside they knew the world only through movies, which they reenacted in their 16th-floor apartment. Moselle’s new subjects - New York’s teen skaters, and in particular teen girl skaters - have resourcefulness and a tight group bond in common with the Wolfpack boys. Vinberg’s credit-carding also inspired the beginning of the new movie Skate Kitchen, directed by Crystal Moselle. These middle-school boys, her friends, went to Rite Aid and bought her supplies. Which might not sound like friendly behavior – but nevertheless, she says, “They were cool.” There was another day when she got her period at the park and was caught unprepared, without cash. The neighborhood boys Vinberg skated with at the time memorialized the incident in chalk drawings of Rachelle with blood gushing from between her legs.

This can yield a horrifying injury, the kind that triggers an involuntarily full-body cringe to observe, and a video of the aftermath of Rachelle’s fall ended up on Hall of Meat, an Instagram account run by Thrasher and devoted to terrible slams. To get credit-carded is to land with the board vertically between your legs: The board is the credit card your crotch is the chip reader. She’d only been skating a couple years at that point. This was in 2012, at the Bethpage Skate Park on Long Island. Rachelle Vinberg got seriously credit-carded for the first time when she was almost 14.

The skate kitchen movie