Directed by Sam Jones
Featuring Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Stacy Perlata, and many of the other playable skaters from the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise
Running Time: 2 hours and 15 minutes
Streaming on HBO Max April 5

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Even if you know nothing about skateboarding, you probably know Tony Hawk. One of my favorite things on the internet of late are Hawk’s tweets about running into people who think he looks like “that Tony Hawk guy” and the hilarity that ensues. He’s so ubiquitous in the world of extreme sports that this isn’t even the first documentary we have covered about Hawk on this website! Yet while pretty much everyone knows who Tony Hawk is, for a whole generation of millennials he’s an icon. When skateboarding crawled out of the valley of irrelevance in the mid to late 1990s, pretty much every kid, tween, and teen bought a skateboard, and that was in large part to Hawk. Whether it was his insane X-Games halfpipe performances or the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game franchise, he was a hero even to the kids–this author included–who didn’t have a coordinated bone in their body. We just liked watching this guy do things on a skateboard that should have been impossible for a human body to do. As this new documentary about Hawk notes, the popularity of skateboarding tends to run on a boom/bust cycle, and yet no matter how popular skateboarding is at any given moment, you could see a picture of Tony Hawk and say, “that looks like Tony Hawks.”[sic]

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off could be totally fine, but with director Sam Jones at the helm it’s fantastic. 2 hours and 15 minutes looks long on paper, especially for a single-subject documentary, but this thing is compelling from end-to-end as Jones fills it with captivating interview subjects and a treasure trove of vintage skateboarding footage. Jones made his name directing the 2002 Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart–which with its fly-on-the-wall approach brilliantly captured the turbulent crafting of the group’s masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot–and though he didn’t exactly capitalize on the success of that doc considering Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off is his first widely released documentary in 20 years, he proves here that it’s more about quality than quantity. 

Though Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off uses the basic biographical documentary formula to tell Hawk’s life story, it tells a parallel story about the cyclical popularity of skateboarding in America. Young Tony Hawk is presented by his peers as someone who was too small and too weak to do the things the other skateboarders were doing in the late 1970s/early 1980s who had to create an entirely unique style to hang with the rest of the pro skaters. Skateboarding legends like Stacy Peralta (throw on his documentary about the birth of skateboarding–Dogtown and Z-Boys–if you want an excellent skateboarding double feature), Steve Caballero, and Rodney Mullen repeatedly talk about how Hawk wasn’t the best at anything, but his dogged determination (often to his own physical detriment) is what propelled him to greatness. 

The film opens with a present day Tony Hawk trying to land his trademark 900 trick at middle age (he’s 53 now). We watch him try and fail to nail the trick at least two dozen times and after every failure you can see the frustration building until he is screaming and banging on the flat bottom of the half-pipe. There are variations on this theme throughout the film, most notably a sequence of footage from the 1999 X-Games when Hawk landed the 900 for the first time. We see a dozen or so tries, each one getting closer and closer to nailing it until he finally comes down with the board under his feet and everyone in attendance losing their damn minds. Anyone can tell you that Tony Hawk’s refusal to give up is one of his greatest attributes as an athlete, but the fact that we see it over and over again in this film is a credit to Sam Jones’ gifts as a documentarian. He’s a “show don’t tell” documentarian and we don’t have enough of those. While I’m hoping Sam Jones uses this to reboot his career and provides us with more great docs going forward, I’m content to take what I can get if they’re all this solid.