Tony Hawk is inarguably the world’s most famous skateboarder and has a strong claim to be the world’s best ever. As a videogamer, it’s impossible to miss the innumerable games bearing his name and he’s emblematic of that whole counterculture. This film serves as a fairly comprehensive and I believe fair biography of him. There are no huge twists and it’s essentially the same kind of story we’ve seen in other top tier athletes. Still the scenes of him skating are jaw-dropping to watch and the forthrightness of Hawk’s responses to the interviewer’s questions marks this as one of the better films of the genre.

This film goes through the standard biographical details of Hawk’s upbringing that I won’t go into. I will note that he seems to have benefited from an exceptionally stable and supportive family. None of them are skateboarders of course yet when he became seriously interested in the hobby, his father actually became involved in organizing competitions and developing it as a sport. Like other top athletes, the key to his success is unwavering determination and an inhuman tolerance to pain. He pretty much breezes to the top of all of the competitions even while he was still a teenager and though he gets some backlash for his showy tricks at first, what another skateboarder calls baton-twirling shit, he eventually becomes immensely popular and everyone’s favorite idol. This success naturally comes with financial rewards and social prestige far above what any other teenager would know and Hawk talks about both his excesses and the crash when skateboarding loses popularity. Towards the end, he and his fellow skateboarders talk about the toll it takes on their bodies but of course none of them intend to stop because if they were the type to take heed of that, they would never have become top skateboarders in the first place.

Every documentary about athletes include plenty of shots of them performing amazing feats. There’s plenty of those in here too but what’s striking is the many more shots of Hawk continually attempting and failing to perform particular tricks. His most famous achievement is being the first person to land the so-called 900 trick in 1999 but as the videos show, he had ten failed attempts at a public competition before finally succeeding. The event organizers basically rewrote the rules to allow him to retry as many times as he wanted and you can see how he gets frustrated but keeps getting back up and come closer and closer after each attempt. Similarly there are shots of him bleeding or in pain after failing to land properly and he talks frankly about the long-term damage to his health that all of these impacts have had on him and how it affects his day-to-day life. The film never gets too negative towards him but there is an appreciable amount of honesty in showing the downsides of his chosen lifestyle.

I’m no skateboarder but you can’t be a videogamer without knowing Tony Hawk given the ubiquity of the games bearing his name and I do know a bit about the X Games events. I enjoyed watching Hawk talk with wide-eyed enthusiasm and honesty about how much money he made from the videogames especially as he clearly isn’t a videogamer himself. Other good moments are when he acknowledges that the general public doesn’t understand most of the subtleties of the tricks he performs and therefore can’t appreciate how difficult they are. So he’s really doing it for his peers who do understand and are trying to replicate his tricks. All the same, for people who don’t know Tony Hawk and don’t care about skateboarding at all, this documentary doesn’t offer much and can be safely skipped. For those who are at least a little bit interested in his life and his career, this serves as a solid biographical film.