Skateboarding masterpiece ‘Betty’ not long on plot, but a lot happens
Crystal Moselle is the creator and director of “Betty,” a show about female skateboarders in New York City beginning its second season June 11 on HBO.
A show about beauty — as well as friendship, community, gender, power, empowerment and the correctable dopiness of dudes — “Betty” is beautiful itself. It isn’t long on plot, but a lot of things happen across each six-episode season without seeming busy or rushed or left by the wayside. It’s involving without being expressly dramatic, exciting without telling you to be excited — a fly-on-the-wall fiction, built on the experiences of a from-thestreets cast.
After years of anonymous commercial work, Moselle broke into public view in 2015 with “The Wolfpack,” a Sundance prize-winning documentary about six brothers who grew up in isolation in a small apartment in lower Manhattan, kept by their father from the corruption of the outside world but watching and re-creating films like “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Dark Knight” in their small apartment. She had spotted them moving as a group and, curious, engaged them. The road to “Betty” began similarly, when Moselle crossed paths with skateboarders Nina Moran and Rachelle Vinberg on the subway. “They were funny, and there was an aura of charisma around them,” she said.
Moselle introduced herself, and when the fashion brand Miu Miu asked her to make a short film for its “Women’s Tales” series, she got in touch with the pair, who got in touch with some other skating friends. The result was 2016’s “That One Day,” which led to the 2018 feature “Skate Kitchen,” which led to the TV series “Betty.” (The title ironically refashions a term for girls who hang around boys who skate.)
Storylines are divided equally
Moonbear, Dede Lovelace, Rachelle Vinberg, Nina Moran and Ajani Russell star in the series “Betty.” among the series’s five stars. and mad. And we always plan, about every person who There is Camille (Vinberg), like, ‘This scene, we’re going is out for sex.) Its characters who is serious and a little innocent; to have a little extra time’ — we make mistakes because that’s Kirt (Moran), a sort of call it ‘Let the Girls Do Their what people do, and they make distracted mystic; Janay (Dede Thing.’ And they’re so good at amends because it’s that kind Lovelace), who thinks big; doing their thing.” of show: socially responsible Honeybear (Moonbear), who Season one was a summertime and a comedy at heart. Moselle makes art and rides the Staten idyll. This year is an captures the quantum state Island Ferry; and Indigo (Ajani autumn story. The colder of being young and no longer Russell), looking to become weather doesn’t stop the skating, being quite as young, oscillating independent from a wealthy, but it offers new visual between melancholy and joy, judgmental mother. Some have possibilities and makes finding when time begins to intrude on girlfriends, some have had somewhere to skate indoors a timelessness. Bad things almost boyfriends. Some work. Some plot point. happen. just seem to skate. Compared with many TV “A lot of us in our youth, we
“There are actual scripts, stories and films about young live in this way that’s maybe a but the girls are really great people, in which grittiness is bit chaotic and a bit destructive, at going off script … we do a often mistaken for realism and and maybe don’t think clearly lot of rehearsal, and if during titillation substitutes for truth, of what we’re doing, and get that process things aren’t feeling “Betty” feels oddly wholesome, very close to getting into a lot right, I’ll change. It really even innocent. One might call of trouble,” Moselle said. “... I depends. Some of the scenes it life-positive. (It is sex-positive, think there are lessons learned there’s more room to go wild as well, though not positive that way.”