Parents' Guide to

Kid 90

By Jennifer Green, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Docu about '90s-era teen celebrities tackles mature topics.

Movie NR 2021 72 minutes
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What's the Story?

Popular child actor Soleil Moon Frye (Punky Brewster) took a camcorder with her everywhere from an early age, and 20 years later she has gone back for the first time to footage from the 1990s and edited it into the documentary KID 90. Moon Frye was part of a group of child and teen actors that spent all their time together in the '90s, so the footage includes images of young celebrities who will be familiar to many viewers. She reflects as an adult on those times and what it has meant to her to go back and watch the videos and read her diary entries after so many years. She faces difficult events from her past that she says she had pushed out of her mind in the intervening years, and she admits to feeling guilty about friends she didn't realize were struggling at that time but who later committed suicide. She and others talk about the difficulty of transitioning from child actor to adult. Friends from that era speak openly about grappling with early fame and rejection, the loss of friends and loved ones, and drug and alcohol problems stemming from their youth.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

Fans of '90s-era celebrities as well as the classic family show Punky Brewster will find this behind-the-scenes walk down memory lane intriguing. But they may be surprised by the downbeat and sincere tone of this personal history. The home videos that director-star Soleil Moon Frye pieces together in Kid 90 provide completely original and private footage of a range of stars from the 1990s, some of whom are no longer alive. Current-day interviews with Moon Frye and others punctuate the videos, voicemail recordings, and excerpts from old diaries, allowing the protagonists to reflect on the events of the past but also on how they remembered them and how they feel about them now. Moon Frye notes that reviewing the footage for the first time in 20 years in order to make this movie was like a second "coming of age" for her. As a wildly famous child actor, Moon Frye says that carrying a camera around at all times in her teen years was a way of taking control. Others also talk about their own reckonings with childhood fame, and, curiously in a retrospective made possible only because someone was constantly filming, there's commentary about how much less scrutiny celebrity teens of the '90s were under in the pre-internet age.

The most striking aspect is the seemingly self destructive behavior of the then-teens, and the near absence of adults in the footage. Even as some of them were speaking out publicly about eschewing drugs and alcohol, they were consuming both heavily in private. Now adults, stars like actor David Arquette and rapper Danny Boy O'Connor talk frankly about barely surviving past drug abuse and hard living. Moon Frye confronts her own role in overlooking friends' serious problems, and the film is dedicated to a handful of young people who committed suicide before the '90s even ended. Others, like Leonardo DiCaprio (whose production house backed this documentary), went onto much bigger careers. We'll never know what footage we aren't seeing here, or information that hasn't been revealed (like the name of the person Moon Frye says raped her at 17) because, like any memoir, this is a personal take on history; it's just one that involves a lot of other well-known people, and it's interesting at the end to watch interviewees reacting to footage of their younger selves. For viewers of a certain age, this film may also offer insight into the act of remembering, and the pain and growth that can come with looking back.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the pressures on child actors, discussed by several people in Kid 90. What are some of the unique situations and challenges they often face?

  • One friend points out that as the creator of the original videos and director of this documentary, Moon Frye can put the pieces together to tell any story she likes in Kid 90. She can make herself the "hero," he notes. How complete do you think the story she tells is? Where could you go for information to confirm or contrast with what's shown in this documentary? Does anyone come across as a "hero"?

  • What effect does it have on viewers to see and hear from the same people today that are filmed in the videos from 20 years ago? What do their contemporary voices add to the story Moon Frye constructs?

  • What differences did you notice in how the teenagers and young adults in the film lived then versus teen life today? How do you think the '90s kids' lives would've been different if they'd grown up in the age of social media?

  • What are some of the ethical issues you might face in recording and sharing videos of your friends?

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