My friend pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity, learned from years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids. In MacGuyver-like fashion, he injected a nearly-parched inkjet cartridge with rubbing alcohol in order to coax out enough ink to print both of our invites to the Nike SB Nothing But the Truth video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness my friend’s feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling ended up being the most interesting event of the evening.

Located amongst love hotels and gauche rock clubs, the theater used for the video premiere is a stark futurist slab with concrete façade — a venue more inclined towards reprints of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotional crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like the Shanghai premiere with ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of scantily-attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would get further cashed out in RMB rather than yen. That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce + faddish extreme sports = bloody consequences for bad judgment.

The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards seemed nonplussed by the chic theater, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium air. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from a 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph blazed across the screen.

Skaters in the video rocked-and-rolled and proved street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming relied on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, but their image-crafting gets in the way of actually revealing how skaters perform split-second miracles through careful calculation and control. Besides Chet Childress’ scenes and a few sequences shot on scarred and barely-ridable concrete highway barriers, the skating itself was mostly a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in.

The usual Nike magic of soaring athletes may have a starring role in the theater of mainstream sports, but on the streets — where failure and improvisation are key — this kind of magic fails to conjure itself. Objects disappear and suddenly reappear with totally new purposes under the fiery slash grinds of skaters. Even the most adroit skaters crash and bleed with far more frequency than they stick tricks in the spotlight of glory. Nothing but the Truth occupies an increasingly crowded corner of the truth-universe, one stuffed with the wall-projection-trophies of manufactured truths about brand and sport synergies and the wacky personalities. What is ultimately on display is not magic, but a kind of taxidermy of risk. Effortlessly precise riders like Paul Rodriguez or hardcore skaters like Childress are made into coherent shills-in-motion to animate the imagination of a global brand.

The video reduces the skating to tightly-framed depictions of bland triumphalism — a glut of flawless tricks made sterile by excising false starts, bad timing, and slams. What we’re given are carefully cropped displays of technical proficiency, as soulless as a sneaker collector’s catalog. In order to give “flavor” to the team, to make them more than flawless-yet-rote street performers, the film introduces the conceit of movies-within-the-movie. The Belgian director duo — working under the nom de plume Lionel Goldstein — use a raw documentary style that ends up undermining a normative portrayal of the sport by giving time to clever exaggerations and mythical underdog stories.

The skaters document themselves as eccentric iconoclasts. This attempt at a kind of ironic nonchalance is unsurprising at a moment when major brands are casually yet determinedly slumming in the erstwhile ghettos of art and sport. With seeming ease, corporate money can now successfully make allies of old-school innovators as Nike SB recently did with Lance Mountain and transgress those old color lines between jock and the outsiders. Goldstein’s technique is perfectly suited to portray this Nike-funded filmic distillation of pure body practice — skateboarding — coming from that wellspring of authenticity — “the streets.” The resulting concoction is a tepid depiction of truth’s ironic mutability — nothing is true here and that indeterminacy makes Nike and its team as legitimately bound up in the intense conflicts over meaning and representation under capitalism as anyone else.

As if to underscore this surreal drama of brand-enhancement and street credibility, the film is scattered with little skits of the skaters being interviewed by lumpy old men in suits posing as Hollywood B-rank producers seated at cheap desks. They want to help the skaters tell their “stories” — whatever improvised piece of theater the team riders could concoct using moldy warehouses full of props and a make-up department and silicone-augmented models. Cut with bits of 16mm film, shot on a near-abandoned movie lot in the desert, these scenes are eerie and aimlessly experimental in their “truth”-telling. They attempt to restore a kind of insane intelligence to the skating that is absent in the clean footage that comprises the bulk of the film. This device isn’t simply a weak plot vehicle to carry the repetitive money-shots of (skating) flesh in action. They are totally disconnected from the skating geographically, thematically, and stylistically, while only loosely serving as introductions for various riders.

The film is most compelling and weirdly unnerving around these scenes: the self-conscious play-acting of the skaters’ own fantasies — ridiculously self-scripted vignettes — within the larger fantasy of being filmed for Nike’s self-promotional and legitimizing video. For us watching, the layered fantasies seemed to present too much incoherence, and the audience stayed quiet, preoccupied with the simple realities of free popcorn and the beer. A trite slam section ended the film, repetitive outtakes belittled as a freakish distraction to the long credits.

I was conscious of watching this quintessentially-Californian rebel-sport enacted on a screen in Tokyo and was struck by how tightly circumscribed to Americans the movie remained. Despite having sponsored riders throughout the world, the film hardly presented Nike SB as a global team. This is in sharp contrast to Nike’s broader trans-national significance — from its production sites littered along the poorer and non-unionized edges of the world’s economy to shoe lines such as Nike’s famed “Glocality” series created by diverse designers representing their particular nationalities. More specifically, while Nike SB has employed Japanese designers such as Takashi and Yuji Sato, therefore extending the creative/cultural linkages across the globe and proving that stylistic metabolism across space and nationality as rewarding and necessary, there was no similar acknowledgment of the vitality of skateboarding’s imagination beyond America. A strikingly-narrow range of skaters skated over far-flung terrain, super-flattened into a nameless mélange of global, (mis)appropriated architecture. The emphasis on Nike SB’s team cadre certainly links its brand to a few recognizable skaters who are geographically positioned to benefit from skateboarding’s media and industry epicenter and its authenticating: originary locations in California.

Across the Pacific Rim, on the streets of Tokyo, this rehearsal of skateboarding’s “true” sites and riders hardly affected the skaters I ride with regularly. Out in the western sprawl along the Chuo train line, skaters generally were unimpressed with Nike SB’s efforts to situate itself as part of their world. The film too was unremarkable to them, particularly because it made no effort to link its narrative or riders to those who share the wider cultural and physical spaces that skateboarding thrives within.

When movie finally finished, there was weak, uncertain applause, and the audience dispersed into the lurid unreality of Shibuya’s pleasure zones. It seemed like we had become part of intertwining fictions, caught up as spectators and participants in fantasy all at once. Despite this, skating’s spontaneous energy couldn’t be completely contained by the film, and my friend and I longed to go lay out some long slappy grinds and recreate some truth for ourselves.