Only the Young

ONLY THE YOUNG   ***

Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims

2012

IDEA:  A documentary following best friends Garrison and Kevin, and Garrison's ex-girlfriend Skye, as they grow tentatively into adulthood in Santa Clarita, CA.

BLURB:  A bittersweet snapshot of youth, Only the Young identifies the moments when adolescent insouciance begins transforming into the concerns of young adulthood. Tippet and Mims draw out the micro-shifts in perception that define this liminal phase for their teenage protagonists, shifts indexed in the candid words and actions that reveal an expanding consciousness of a world that is not as stable as once thought. The desolate desert landscape that surrounds Skye, Garrison, and Kevin, mostly nothing but a generous canvas for their escapades, comes to weigh more heavily as an economic reality; relationships taken for granted gradually seem as susceptible to decay as the milieu. Yet there is rarely the sense that these kids are in trouble, partly due to their financial security, and partly because Only the Young focuses, perhaps to a fault, on the exuberance and freedoms that characterize their relatively privileged circumstances. The film may balk at digging deeper into their lives – for the most part, we never hear about their families – but it also, admirably, doesn’t universalize them. They are situated as teens in the 2010s in Santa Clarita, California, and however consonant or not they are with the spectator’s own adolescence, their expressions of joy, anxiety, and hope, captured as intimate ethnography, are palpable in their generational specificity.