Jonah Hill is in the New York offices of his film distributor, A24, as he almost always is these days. There is a conference room that the executives here at the company would probably like to use, but can't, because Jonah Hill is in there all the time, talking about the movie he directed, Mid90s. The conference room has a Mid90s poster on the wall. It's as silent and hushed as a shrine. Here he can just talk, and talk, and talk, about Mid90s—he's been doing it all fall, with no dip in stamina or energy. Every conversation is like the first conversation he's ever had about it. There's no way of overstating the breadth of his enthusiasm, his terror, his pride, his manic energy around this film. “It's my best friend,” he says about Mid90s. He's dressed all in black, like he might go direct another movie right now. Golden hair, golden beard, attentive stare. “It's literally my best friend. Like, anytime I was sad, angry, happy, lonely, I'd go in my room and I'd just write, spend time with this, cater to it, build it. And then now it goes off into the world and someone can…beat it and punish it or hug it. This kind of thing is vulnerable in a way I've never experienced before.”

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The film, which took four years and 20 drafts and a whole lot of his soul to finish, contains basically everything Hill has ever loved: skating, rap music, '90s independent cinema, Los Angeles. It's about a young kid named Stevie, played by a young kid named Sunny Suljic, who lives in a fraught and abusive home and is ultimately adopted by a crew of older skateboarders, who introduce him to drugs and girls and the freedom that comes from bashing yourself into concrete from greater and greater heights. It's the best fictional film about skateboarding since Kids, and it has the Harmony Korine cameo to prove it. Hill takes the awesome nihilism of that film and turns it inside out, to make something intimate and a little sad about self-love and acceptance.

As an actor, Hill first became known for his particular skill in playing a type of character—whether in 2007's Superbad, the comedy that made him famous, or 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street, the drama that garnered him his second of two Oscar nominations—who used aggression to camouflage hurt: He was an open wound, but with serrated edges. He often felt, and acted, that way in real life, too. “I think he's always been vulnerable,” Emma Stone, who has known Hill since they co-starred in Superbad, says. “And he's always been incredibly sensitive.” But as a 34-year-old director, Hill is a mood seeker, a nurturer. The film is harsh in the way its protagonists—mostly untrained actors, from which Hill extracts measured, naturalistic performances—talk to one another, as skaters in the '90s did, but Hill is primarily in search of transcendence: This is what the light looks like at the end of a Los Angeles day. This is what it feels like to make a friend. This is what it's like to be known.

Making the film changed something deep inside him, Hill says. It made him…happy. Happier, anyway. It's not that he's giving up on being an actor—just this year he starred in Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, as a recovering addict with a penchant for gold watches, flowing robes, and deep empathy, and in Cary Fukunaga's Netflix series, Maniac, in an on-screen reunion with Stone. But making a film of his own allowed him to see himself differently somehow: as not just an actor but a peer to the directors he used to act for, like Martin Scorsese, or the Coen brothers. Hill's not comparing himself to these guys; he's just thrilled he gets to talk shop with them now. He's been texting with Paul Thomas Anderson about Mid90s—Hill's assistant recently framed the exchange and gave it to him as a gift. “It has my really sweaty, neurotic texts,” Hill says, and then Anderson's response. Hill almost fell over when the first message came in. Okay, the truth is: He did fall over.