After another failed attempt at the 900, Tony Hawk stays down, releasing a bloodcurdling scream to release stress that’s been building up over hours filled with trial and failure. But he eventually gets back up, just to fail again, and again, and again.
“Watching Tony learn and fall is more interesting than watching him land tricks,” Rodney Mullen, one of the best freestyle skateboarders of all time, says halfway through HBO’s Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, released April 5.
The documentary, which sports a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of publication, chronicles Hawk’s life journey, while tackling what it really means to be successful. It covers everything from his first time skating, when Hawk crashed into a fence because he didn’t know how to turn, to some of his more recent ventures in stardom.
Hawk was born when his mother was 43, with his three older siblings in high school and college. Throughout childhood, he knew he was an accident, and annoyed everyone he came in contact with, until he got into skateboarding, which humbled him.
Even as a kid, Hawk was unique in that he could fail for hours on end while trying to perform a single trick. Stacy Peralta, one of the biggest names in skateboarding at the time, had noticed this trait, leading Hawk to join the Bones Brigade, a San Diego-based skating group run by Peralta.
All along his path to fame, Hawk was a part of the Bones Brigade, which released the first ever sports action video, allowing new skaters to learn tricks at home. After each member became rich, they disbanded in the early 90s during the near-death of skateboarding as a sport.
Hawk, who had spent his money poorly, began working odd jobs, depending on his first wife to provide for him and their son. The X-Games, which began in the mid-90s, slowly pumped blood back in the skating community, until it exploded in 1999 when Hawk was the first person to successfully land a 900 degree aerial spin.
Being more famous than ever before, Hawk admits he did a lot he regrets, including being unfaithful to multiple women, and raising his four kids with a revolving door of co-parents. Recently, Hawk checked himself into “a place” where he was only allowed out to skate for a few hours every morning, with the goal of channeling his skating discipline into the rest of his life.
The end of the documentary shifts course, asking an interesting question: is joy worth the risk? Hawk, and the other skaters featured in the documentary, open up about the permanent damage they’ve done to their bodies. Despite the constant pain they experience, many continue skating, saying there’s nothing else they’d rather do, and even acknowledging that most of them will probably die because of an injury. Hence “Until the Wheels Fall Off”.
The quality of filmmaking is on par with the quality of the doc’s content, being chock-full of never-before-seen archive photos and videos, interwoven with recent interviews with Hawk, his siblings and other well-known skaters. Had director Sam Jones chosen to make a profile on any other subject, he never would’ve been able to achieve such a feat. Skateboards and video cameras entered the average American household in tandem, leading the ladder to become a cornerstone of the former’s culture. Every skater is excited to record their new tricks, even today.