It's not so much a fault of the film's as the simple fact that Gator's life defies explanation or analysis. It's the archetypical too-much-too-young story, but the violence it leads to doesn't follow at all from the preceding events. Nothing about Gator's days of fame or his sad decline from popularity prepare you to understand why things ended up the way they did. Director Helen Stickler does a fine job of putting Gator in context for those who have never followed skateboarding, but she fails to find the deep connection between his "rise" and "fall" … because there really doesn't seem to be one. Stickler managed to get sound-bites from Gator, but as they're called in from a prison telephone, there's a real distance between the audience and the film's subject. It's hard to get a strong sense of meaning, or resolution, from Gator's words, and Stickler covers the actual crime so obliquely that the impact of his darkest moment is kind of obscured. This may have to do with the fact that the film probably didn't need to be more than about 20 minutes long, and she's squeezing more drama from the story than there actually is. The skateboard fan in me loved seeing the 80s footage (such as Gator riding a ramp on "Club MTV" and dancing awkwardly alongside Downtown Julie Brown, who doesn't seem to know why there are skateboarders in the house). The true-crime junkie in me loved the reportage of Gator's crime and punishment. But ultimately Stoked is a messy glomming-together of two stories that have nothing to do with each other. Unfortunately for Gator Rogowski, this distasteful mess is his life.
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