Winner of the Audience and Director's Awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the kinetic social history document Dogtown & Z-Boys suggests that the amalgamation of art and sport created a unique brand of protest performance art centred around eight kids growing up in the "dead wonderland" of Venice Beach (and the surrounding urban wasteland referred to by the locals as Dogtown). Directed by Stacy Peralta, a member of the legendary Zephyr Skating Team that almost single-handedly defined the modern X-Game at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, Dogtown & Z-Boys accomplishes several tasks at once, evoking the ethic that captured the imagination of American punks, portraying the dangers of stardom, and telling a rags-to-riches fable about how boys (and a girl) from the wrong side of the tracks sometimes make good on their own terms. The film is so intent on harnessing the off-the-cuff spirit that informed the Zephyr Team ("Z-Boys") that we hear narrator Sean Penn cough and clear his throat.

Dogtown & Z-Boys is blessed with archival stills and footage taken by photojournalists Craig Stecyk and Glen E. Friedman showing the Z-Boys first as surfers, then as backyard "urban guerrillas" during a statewide drought that hit California in the early '70s. The severe water shortage caused some homeowners to drain their pools, leading the Z-Boys to inventing the "vert" (vertical half-pipe), taking their skateboards up along the sides of a concrete pool's deep end: emulating surf gods in oceans of industry. In the film's best sequence, Peralta edits and superimposes images of legendary surfer Larry Bertleman cutting a wave over images of the Z-Boys mimicking the man's style in those pools and on the asphalt crests of Dogtown's schools, where giant canals had been created in an attempt to even the rolling landscape.

The real heart of Dogtown & Z-Boys comes in the documentation of the ferocious graffiti that festooned the concrete ruins of the tribalistic Z-Boys' stomping ground ("locals only") before it became the basis for the designs of decorating Jeff Ho and Craig Stecyk's legendary Zephyr Shop surfboards. The graffiti is a revelation because Peralta's film suggests that the skateboarders themselves were creating a kind of inner city revolt, utilizing the sterile architecture of man in the twentieth century as every bit the canvas for dissidence as the graffitists who came before them. Like the images of those spray-paint Rembrandts, the Z-Boys eventually were hijacked by industry and corporate sponsorship, victims of their own visibility and success.

Dogtown & Z-Boys is as flamboyantly executed as the Z-Boys' aerial exploits, evoking blithe rebel fantasy with the kind of insouciance embedded in the sexy demise of James Dean. Like Peralta himself, the most successful of the Z-Boys in the years following their heyday, the film betrays a surplus of intelligence and passion. Dogtown & Z-Boys makes believers out of squares, presents a compelling socio-political education as it entertains, and best of all, motivates you to go down to the store to buy a skateboard, some Vans, and a helmet to recapture a little of that lost impetuousness of youth. It's distilled adolescence seasoned with proper portions of nostalgia, bottled with craft and served cool. Drink deep, it's the fountain of reckless creation and we could all use a little of its inspiration.-Walter Chaw

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