The success of 2001’s Dogtown and Z-Boys, about the rise of the 1970s
skateboarding culture, and the colorful characters who populated it,
kicked off a string of alt-sports documentaries that shone a spotlight
on the new favorite outdoor pastimes of all those X-treme kids glimpsed in
Mountain Dew commercials. Telling a bit more specifically focused story
than the Oscar-shortlisted surf-boom doc Riding Giants, debut
director Jeremy Gosch’s engaging yet somewhat myopic film chronicles a
half dozen golden-skinned kids, Aussies and South Africans, who in the
mid-70s crashed the North Shore of Oahu and, through headstrong force
of will, dragged the more laidback surf culture toward the
multi-billion dollar industry that it is today.

Narrated by Edward Norton, Bustin’ Down the Door features an abundance of prodigious wipe-outs and other amazing footage from the era — shimmering mountains of wave that amply back up the legendary birth-of-a-sport stories from Wayne Bartholomew, Shaun Tomson, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards (above) and others. For water-soaked beachheads, this narrowcast movie is an easy sell. Yet Gosch exhibits precious little skill at or interest in framing this story for outsiders (what with talk of “backsiders dropping into the temple going the wrong way”), and so consequently the movie is a bit of a slow seduction for landlubbers. It takes a while, but the personalities of the various subjects eventually take hold, and win you over. It’s not until two-thirds of the way in, though, that the movie catches its biggest wave, when delving more explicitly into the tension, fisticuffs and even death threats suffered by some of the Aussies at the hands of the “Da Hui,” a native Hawaiian group that felt it had been dissed in cocky media interviews used to inflate the reputations of the outsiders. For more information, click here. (Screen Media Films, unrated, 96 minutes)