"Songs mean a lot / when songs are bought," sneered Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus on "Cut Your Hair," a catchy single that ironically turned out to be the band's biggest crossover hit. In a simple couplet, Malkmus expresses the truism that integrity is the one commodity that loses all value the moment it's put up for sale. No one took this lesson harder than Mark "Gator" Rogowski, a professional skateboarder whose life followed the cruel trajectory of an E! True Hollywood Story, with 15 minutes of fame swallowed up by the 31 years to life he's currently serving in a California penitentiary for rape and murder. An absorbing and meticulous piece of reportage, Helen Stickler's fine documentary Stoked views Gator's tragic story as a case study in the identity crisis that gripped the skating world in the late '80s, when a sport built on rebelliousness was co-opted by the corporate dollar. Once the elite thrashers gave themselves over to a fad, they were at the mercy of the pop-culture machinery, swept up by instant celebrity and just as swiftly deposited on the other side. Supported by unusually strong archival footage and interviews with many of the major players, including such skating names as Tony Hawk and Stacy Peralta (who also directed the entertaining Dogtown And Z-Boys), Stickler deftly connects Gator's disturbing profile to the larger picture. When "vertical" skating–an aerial style practiced on large ramps and in abandoned swimming pools–experienced a surge in popularity in the mid-'80s, Gator was among its most charismatic ambassadors, with just enough "bad boy" edge to lure the sponsors. His image become the icon for Vision Skateboards, which aggressively seized on the moment with boards, videos, and Vision Streetwear, which stamped its giant logo on shirts and shorts marketed to the mainstream. At the height of his exposure, Gator netted about $20,000 a month from board sales and other royalties, enough to buy him a lavish country home with his underage girlfriend, a blonde groupie (or "Skate Betty") named Brandi. When "vert" skating gave way to street skating overnight, and the Vision label soured from overexposure, he couldn't survive the transition, spiraling into the self-destructive behavior that eventually led him to kill Brandi's closest friend in 1991. Tempting as it is, Stickler wisely stops short of fingering corporate America as the proverbial second gunman, especially when all parties agree that Gator's X-treme narcissism and quick temper made his downfall as self-inflicted as it was inevitable. But through this gripping cautionary tale, Stoked captures a key moment when anarchy was made available to the highest bidder, which then packaged and sold it back to consumers for diminishing returns. Left with nothing more to sell, Gator ran out of buyers.