Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kid 90’ on Hulu, ‘Punky Brewster’ Star Soleil Moon Frye’s Excruciatingly Intimate Autobiographical Documentary

Hulu’s Kid 90 is a where-are-they-now documentary in which Punky Brewster star Soleil Moon Frye sort of tells us where she’s been and where she, uh, is now. And where exactly is she now, besides headlining a brand-new revival of her hit 1980s sitcom? She’s in her own head, reflecting on the person she was in the ’90s, when she was a teenager who constantly chronicled her life with a video camera and in written diaries. (She even saved all her voicemails!) She locked all the tapes and notebooks away for years, dug them up recently and was inspired to direct this film, which could be an epic exercise in navel-gazing, or it could find something universal for all ’90s kids to identify with.

KID 90: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Moon Frye calls her little treasure trove of recorded memories a “Pandora’s box.” The video footage is full of deeply personal moments — sad, happy, silly, revealing, embarrassing and maybe even incriminating moments. This compulsory documentation of her life happened after she was a ubiquitous child star thanks to Punky Brewster. She lived with her mother, who owned a catering company; her father was a bit-part/character actor who palled around with Paul Newman and Marlon Brando, but wasn’t around much. She was seven years old when she was cast as Punky; cuea vintage clip or three and some archival footage of her being adorably precocious during talk show interviews.

The show ran from 1984-88, and despite her fame, Moon Frye’s acting career subsequently fizzled. One reason for that? “Punky Boobster.” That was her new nickname. She “started developing.” Rapidly. She was no longer the sweet little moppet the world expected her to be. She was getting T&A roles, and she was only 13. Around this time, she picked up a video camera and started filming, fearlessly. Maybe you remember the People magazine cover about her cosmetic surgery — she had breast reduction surgery at 15, and we see home-movie footage of her in the pre-op room prepping for the procedure. Friends and family comfort her as she convalesces; she winces as she shows the camera big purple bruises on her side, peeking out of her bandages.

The film follows Moon Frye through her hard-partying teen years. We see her take a drag on a joint and take a slug from a bottle of Jagermeister as we hear audio from an old talk show in which she professes kids to “just say no” to drugs. She and her friends take mushrooms and cavort in a field, playing with ladybugs and philosophizing about raindrops on the windshield like Very High Teenagers. She leaves her Los Angeles home at 18 to attend college in New York, scraping by in a spartan apartment with a futon and no refrigerator, falling in with a new group of friends. The partying continued, as you might expect. You know some of her friends from both coasts: Jenny Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Sara Gilbert, Mark-Paul Gosselar, Leonardo DiCaprio (a credited producer of Kid 90), Justin Pierce, Stephen Dorff, Jonathan Brandis, David Arquette, Danny Boy O’Connor (of rap group House of Pain). She asks many of them to give their philosophy on life. Some of them are featured in new interviews, looking back; others aren’t alive to do so. This was Moon Frye’s young life, and looking back at all this, she says she’s “coming of age as an adult.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Kid 90 is an odd, oddly compelling marriage of Alex Winter’s child-actor cautionary-tale doc Showbiz Kids and Sarah Polley’s unconventional and intimate identity-quest doc Stories We Tell. (As a side note, Arquette was the subject of a recent where-is-he-now doc too, the way-goofy You Can’t Kill David Arquette.)

Performance Worth Watching: Arquette is kind of his usual squirrelly self, but that also means he doesn’t mince words about how he barely made it out of his celeb-teen years alive. “Acid, mushrooms, coke” — he pauses — “crack, heroin…”

Memorable Dialogue: Moon Frye’s thesis statement: “Are memories real or are they the stories we want to tell ourselves?”

Sex and Skin: None, although there’s a verbal description of sexual assault.

Our Take: Kid 90 isn’t the typical crash-and-burn tragedy/redemption-story narrative that so many child-star bios follow. It’s excruciatingly intimate at times, but Moon Frye tries to push through the cringe factor of seeing one’s younger self doing and talking about the things only younger selves do and talk about. She frequently goes a step further, revealing her experiences with sexual assault and death during intense, crushingly tragic moments.

Of course, many of her friends are also famous, and like her, found themselves in a business that forced them into adulthood too soon. And their form of escape was via very adult means — drugs, alcohol, sex — that their underdeveloped minds couldn’t handle. It’s only with the distance of a couple decades that Moon Frye recognizes this now; she digs up past traumas and bravely stares them down. The film ends with a tribute to eight friends who died as a result of depression or substance abuse, and even if she doesn’t state it outright, the correlation between showbiz and tragedy is clear.

Despite Moon Frye’s generally upbeat and engaging persona as both teen and adult, the film isn’t a fun watch. It’s anti-nostalgic. It’s also not exclusively the stuff of celebrities’ lives. Her reams of camcorder footage are revealing in their rawness; remove the names, and a lot of it is familiar teenage angst born from broken families and abuse. The film feels intuitively assembled, patched together and sometimes vague, as if Moon Frye is searching for the feeling or emotion that pointed her younger self in the general direction of growth. It’s not a detailed account, which some may find frustrating, but it’s kind of beautiful in its messiness, in its unvarnished truth.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kid 90 is occasionally indulgent and navel-gazey, but it comes from a place of empathy and healing. Moon Frye likely found the process of making it cathartic, and no doubt hopes watching it does the same for her audience too.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Kid 90 on Hulu