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‘Kid 90’ and the Pull of the Last Great American Decade
The Clinton years aren’t what we really miss — it’s the power of being older and knowing better
Soleil Moon Frye’s documentary Kid 90, which premiered on Hulu this month, is an exercise in resurrected childhood. Frye was a child star in the early ’90s, the eponymous character in the show Punky Brewster, and she knew most of the other child and teen actors in the business. She often carried a camcorder to parties, and she now possesses footage of dozens of nostalgia-gilded faces caught at the height of their fame and completely off-guard. (David Arquette! Brian Austin Greene! Leonardo DiCaprio for about three seconds!)
What Kid 90 wants to say, outside of “look at all these famous people,” isn’t always clear. Frye is a charming narrator of her own life, but she’s also a criminally self-indulgent one. Sentences like “it was like rock and roll, with rap” are uttered; she dreamily recites poems about her time spent among skateboarding New York City “Rastafarians,” every single one of them (the camcorder footage informs us) white as the driven snow; surely, someone must have told her to cut the scene where she refers to her ex-boyfriend, the notorious domestic abuser Charlie Sheen, as “my Mr. Big.”
