No matter how old you were, where you lived or how many T-shirts and mixtapes you owned, it’s unlikely that you remember the mid-1990s as well — as obsessively, as nostalgically, as literally — as “Mid90s” does. Written and directed by Jonah Hill, this film wants to be less a period piece than a time capsule, an immersion in the sights and sound of a pop-cultural moment.

And even, almost, the smells. After Stevie (Sunny Suljic) smokes his first mentholated cigarette, he darts into a gas station men’s room on his way home, chugs some liquid soap straight from the bottle and fumigates his clothes with a cloud of air freshener. Stevie, whose coming-of-age story this is, lives with his brooding, violent-tempered older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges), and their beleaguered single mom, Dabney (Katherine Waterston), in a modest house in Los Angeles. He’s a small guy, on the cusp of puberty, with wide blue eyes and a smile that undercuts his determined efforts to seem tough.

At first, Stevie worships Ian, whose interests are hip-hop, street fashion and orange juice. Ian returns his younger brother’s admiration with sullen silence or brutality — the first shot of the film is of a beating that leaves a nasty bruise on Stevie’s chest. Soon enough, he finds new idols among a group of bigger kids who hang out at a skateboard shop, and he makes it his project to fit in with them.