Grind
''Grind'' is the tale of one Chicago youth looking for stardom with his three pals. And in its pure ambition, the movie joins everything from ''Babes on Broadway'' to ''Glitter'' as another chapter of the oldest story ever told about that gnarly business we call show. Of course, neither Andy and Judy nor Mariah Carey wreaked havoc on tour bus bathrooms; they didn't break into wild group singalongs to 15-year-old Poison records, and they certainly couldn't grind on banisters and bike racks the way the boys in ''Grind'' do. (Incidentally, to grind is to slide with a skateboard along the surface of any obstacle a skater might face.)
Not purely for X-Games hounds, not necessarily for their parents, and definitely not the X-Box stand-in haters might have anticipated, ''Grind'' is what happens when an entire movie is composed of outtakes. The pranks outweigh the tricks 2 to 1 in Casey La Scala's crude and exuberant little movie.
Eric, Matt, Nathan, and Sweet Lou (Mike Vogel, Vince Vieluf, Adam Brody, and Joey Kern) hit the road as groupies for a skating superstar, Johnny Wilson (Jason London, the movie's only plank of driftwood). All Johnny has to do is watch their tape, and he'll know that the blond pretty boy Eric, in particular, deserves his own endorsement deal. We don't even see what Eric is made of until his high-noon, half-pipe trick-off against one of the white hip-hop fiends who has been terrorizing our quartet in their Escalade.
Until Eric's breakthrough, there are days of knuckle sandwiches, miles of indifferent ladies, and hijinks on a micro-budget to tide them over. Money might be able to buy sweet decks (the boards on which boys skate), but a bountiful sense of humor is priceless, and the bond between the film's four stars is this movie's selling point. Vogel is the straight man, Vieluf is the affable unsexed sociopath, Brody is the neurotic, and Kern, in a feat of plagiaristic genius, just plays Matthew McConaughey's skirt-chasing loser from ''Dazed and Confused.'' Together, they're a borderline surreal new-comedy troop -- the Monkees in trucker caps and a pair of Etnies on the Interstate to Oz. There's even a cleansing stop at a clown college (copresided over by Randy Quaid) that functions nicely as an Emerald City.
What ''Grind'' lacks in cinematic skill, it makes up for in heart, which is what most dudes-in-arms flicks are missing. Given the option of spending eternity with these gentlemen or the boys of ''American Pie,'' I'd choose the lads of ''Grind.'' They might smell worse, but they know a good time when one threatens to make a fool of them.
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