Bum vibes in surf city

Reviewed - Lords of dogtown: THIS dramatisation of the rise of skateboarding as a pastime - later sport, religion and industry - for the disaffected youth of Los Angeles's west side has much to recommend it.

Layered with iconic white rock music, shot in a dappled haze, Lords of Dogtown does a decent job of getting across the texture of life in Venice Beach during the 1970s. But the picture feels like a perfunctory footnote to more impressive work by its writer, Stacy Peralta, and its director, Catherine Hardwicke.

Perlata's superb 2002 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys has already told how younger surfers, including Stacy himself, brought the skills they had honed on the waves to concrete while skateboarding in empty swimming pools during a severe drought. Hardwicke's Thirteen, as funky, but more cutting than the new film, said everything that needed to be said about the complex relations between countercultural parents and their children in the hipper corners of LA.

Had the film-makers managed to find an original story to tell, then Lords of Dogtown might have seemed necessary. But in detailing the characters' passage from youthful excitement to unlikely celebrity to disillusionment at the commercialism that has affected their pursuit, the film comes across like a slackly plotted Boogie Nights blended with an earthbound Big Wednesday.

Heath Ledger does good work as the disorganised surfing entrepreneur who brings the lads together as a team, and John Robinson, the Aryan youth at the centre of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, is winning as Peralta. But a dramatic feature cannot get by on atmosphere and feel alone.