Only The Young is a documentary about Christian skateboarders, a love-story, an ode to the days of being young and carefree. Religion and skateboarding are significant both in the film and in the lives of its protagonists, but the film is a coming-of-age story in the truest and most lyrical sense. Dreamily captured and affectionately rendered, Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’ film perfectly encapsulates a universal feeling of standing on threshold of adulthood, with all the hopes and trepidations that come with it.

The movie follows two friends, Kevin and Garrison, through the last few months they will spend together in their small town in California’s Canyon Country. The two spend every day together, skating through the desert landscape, creating makeshift skate parks, claiming an abandoned house as their own. But we’re meeting the boys, together with mutual love interest Skye, at a time of transition. As things like love begin to enter their worlds, the imminence of growing up surfaces, imbuing each moment with evanescence because we know we are witnessing the last moments of wide-eyed youth.

Skateboarding is what binds Kevin and Garrison together, yet Only The Young provides a refreshingly different perspective on the sport. Skating’s fluidity and grace informs the film’s aesthetic, its intrinsic freedom allegorically bound to youth itself. Although the two friends ‘skate for Christ’ as part of a Christian skateboarding group, the film doesn’t foreground its protagonists’ religious beliefs, rather choosing to present their beliefs as another facet of their characters.

Only The Young lures you in with its blissful shots and sublime soundtrack and, without ever bordering on cutesy, envelopes you in these fleeting moments of being in love, being young, being stupid, being bored, at once reveling in the prospect of growing up and at the same time scared of what that means.

- Cressida Greening