Movie Review: 'Kid 90'

There is a temptation to write off the new to Hulu documentary Kid 90 as a navel gazing bit of personal nostalgia on the part of director and subject Soleil Moon Frye. The former Punky Brewster star, or rather current Punky Brewster revival star, now that I think of it, assembled Kid 90 from her own video and diary collection. As a teenager in Hollywood in the early 90’s, Frye carried her camera everywhere and captured her life in great detail.

So why is this not merely navel gazing? It is, after all, just a group of friends reminiscing about the early 90s in a way that is very specific to themselves. Kid 90 escapes mere nostalgia by taking the subject of memory and nostalgia very seriously. Rather than putting on rose colored glasses and playing up the parties and down the drugs and troubles, Kid 90 delves into introspection and via Frye’s compelling honesty, into an area where you can’t help but make her lessons into your own.

Soleil Moon Frye shot to fame as Punky Brewster when she was a mere 8 years old. By the time she was 14, she was seemingly washed up. The biggest thing in Frye’s career at that point were her breasts and I don’t say that to score a cheap laugh. It’s an important and instructive point in Kid 90 that as a teenager, well below any age of consent, Soleil Moon Frye developed quickly and painfully in the public eye.

Grown adults dedicated time to discussing Frye’s development, something she had NO control over, but was nevertheless castigated for. So awful was the scrutiny of her breasts that Frye felt no alternative but to have breast reduction surgery before she’d even reached her senior year of High School. Her breasts landed her on the cover of People Magazine, it made her a target of tabloids, and she was the subject of an episode of Phil Donahue.

Can you even begin to imagine the magnitude of what she was going through at this time? Kid 90 takes us right into those moments and nearly 30 years later you can sense that a lot of what happened to Soleil Moon Frye are things she’s still not ready to completely process. The documentary gets her honest feelings about these incidents but at times she comes off as confused and astonished by these moments as we are.

Kid 90 isn’t done astonishing however as we slowly come to realize the sheer amount of death that surrounded one our most beloved child stars. The documentary features heart rending phone messages from Frye’s friends who include the late Jonathan Brandis, a former boyfriend who visited her in the hospital following her breast reduction surgery. Actor Rodney Harvey called Frye just days before he took his own life in 1998. And, in one of the most shocking moments, Frye shows footage that was apparently captured the night that Adult Film Actress Shannon ‘Savannah’ Wilsey crashed her car and then took her own life.

Smartly, Frye does not linger on or exploit Wilsey’s death. It’s glanced over because they were apparently friends but if you want to know the horrific details of Wilsey’s death, Kid 90 offers no answers. The documentary is not done with death however as Frye’s life shifted from L.A in the early 90s to New York City for her college years. Here, Frye falls in with the cast of the controversial Larry Clark cinema verite teen movie, Kids.

The real life cast of Kids was made up of skateboarders and teens from the real streets of New York and Soleil Moon Frye became their friend. So close was she with this group that it was not unusual for skaters to be passed out in Frye’s apartment at all hours of the day and night. Frye apparently had a brief romance with charismatic young star Justin Pierce before he took his own life in 2000. Harold Hunter, meanwhile, was one of those people staying at Frye’s apartment regularly. He died in 2006 from a drug overdose.

I’m making Kid 90 out to be quite a sad documentary and at times, it very much is. But the documentary is more than the dreary end of many people in Soleil Moon Frye’s sphere. Certainly there is a sense of ‘there for the grace of God go I’ moments, but the documentary is more about the way we remember the past than how the past really happened. Memory can’t change that your friends have died but how you remember them is based entirely on how they lived in your memory and that’s a fascinating concept.

It’s especially interesting when you consider the footage that Soleil Moon Frye collected over the years., She can see things as they were and compare them to how she remembers them. She has journals and letters she wrote. And watching her look at them and react is very compelling. Poignantly, there is a letter that young Soleil wrote to her older self that Frye found and read for the first time in Kid 90. It’s a lovely grace note for this bittersweet meditation on memory and how memory shapes who we become.

Kid 90 is sweet, funny, dark at times but insightful. Soleil Moon Frye is a compelling and charismatic presence and you get no sense that she’s holding anything back while also maintaining a fair line of demarcation between what belongs in the public sphere and what belongs to her and her alone. The whole of Kid 90 feels intimate and confessional without going into places it shouldn’t. Confession with discretion is a difficult balancing act but I thought Kid 90 pulled that off with aplomb.

Kid 90 debuts on Hulu on March 12th.