Lords of Dogtown is the second movie helmed by Catherine Hardwicke, coming off the relative success of Thirteen. Her debut movie was praised for its gritty, unrelenting depiction of teen rebelliousness, but for me its hard-focused single-angled approach moved a little too close to caricature. Great performances gave that movie its balance, but Lords of Dogtown, in lacking a force like Evan Rachel Wood to give it a center (and even a Holly Hunter to create an orbiting force), only emphasizes the weaknesses of this kind of approach. Made to see the world through the eyes of several rebels without causes, their conscience-less antics feel less human and more like parody.

Hardwicke is not completely at fault; she has an eye that matches motion to emotions, and this makes up, visually at least, for the material's general lack of substance, a problem  we can probably blame on Stacy Peralta, one of the skateboarding legends featured in this true story-inspired film. Peralta is rather enamoured of his past, it seems -- he directed the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which covers the exact same subject of the pioneering skateboarders of late '70s Venice Beach, California. Not surprisingly, both films come from a biased viewpoint, which can be fascinating in and of itself, but, in the case of Lords of Dogtown, it mostly  isn't.

What we are given involves a rather run-of-the-mill version of rebels who find that, when success comes knockin', it's hard to keep it real. Cliches are a-plenty here. All the skateboarding kids are undisciplined punks who like to stir things up (except, curiously, Peralta, who is seen as something of a straight arrow), while all the authority figures are old, balding, stuffy types who rile at the youths' antics. One of the three main characters has a trailer-trash-type mother Eminem would be proud of. The original Z-Boys sponsor (Heath Ledger) is a surfer bum who thinks "job" is a dirty word and yells at his own customers if they're merely in his shop to browse, such a counter-authority fellow is he. Hardwicke doesn't do her gender any favors, as the girls here are all groupies who will jump into bed with any local rock star. So literal is the antiestablishment vibe that whenever there's a moment primed to make kids wanna punch out an old square, they get to see it acted out.

Many of these factors serve to make the movie seem more patronizing than it probably means to be. It's kind of like xXx, except in that movie the rebelliousness was fake and calculated; in Lords of Dogtown, it's substantiated by fact-based events, as in, "we were there, man, this was real." But historical accountability still can't excuse it from feeling like an exercise in self-aggrandizement, a self-conscious attempt to staple a sense of cool and respect to what some might consider the roots of x-treme sports. There's no other view on display here; the movie could've benefited from a few moments of self-deflation, but, for better or for worse, it stays true to giving its drama a hard-sell.

So if anything gives the movie its character, it's Hardwicke's style, which, as in Thirteen, still shows more potential than realization, but at least it's there. The skateboarding scenes are filmed with honesty; we don't get a lot of distracting editing, we do get a few captivating tracking shots. Hardwicke may, however, need to move away from her habit of shooting a film in documentary style (especially for this project -- I mean, it was already a documentary once). Her camera observes, and in a case like this, where the three main stars -- Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, and John Robinson -- have no perceivable chemistry with each other, the results are less than enthralling. Thus, Lords of Dogtown gives only the appearance of realism; underneath, however, there isn't much humanity, just another slick product showing off the eternal restlessness of the rebel.

(Released by Columbia Pictures and rated "PG-13" for drug and alcohol content, sexuality,violence, language and reckless behavior -- all involving teens.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.