The beggar on the New York subway has a body truncated at the waist and he rolls on a cart, chanting “I have no legs!” in a singsong as he passes. Just for a moment, he attracts the notice of Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce), who look young and healthy but are actually much more damaged than this legless man.
As Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) so harrowingly demonstrates, these two are part of a spiritually dead teen-age culture built on aimlessness, casual cruelty and empty pleasure. Mr. Clark’s vision of these characters is so bleak and legitimately shocking that it makes almost any other portrait of American adolescence look like the picture of Dorian Gray.

Kids is so tough, with a visual style that looks so uncompromisingly authentic, that its semblance of realism immediately raises questions. Is Mr. Clark, the still photographer whose celebrated images capture such stark and frightening behavioral extremes, merely recording the urban teen-age life he has seen? Or is this a lurid and cynical exaggeration? In the end, Kids is far too serious to be tarred as exploitation, and its extremism is both artful and devastatingly effective. Think of this not as cinema verite but as a new strain of post-apocalyptic science fiction, using hyperbole to magnify a kernel of terrible, undeniable truth.
Think of it also as an extremely difficult film to sit through, with an emphasis on societal disintegration and adolescent selfishness at its most sordid. Mr. Clark, making a fierce, daringly unsentimental directorial debut, gives his audience no relief from the ugliness of his characters’ behavior. He strips Kids of lofty speeches, disapproving parents and nice-guy heroes, concentrating only on the hedonistic here-and-now. The film maker also withholds his own judgment on the events seen here, or perhaps doesn’t make any. Not many viewers will find it easy to be laissez-faire.
Certainly Kids begins with a deliberate jolt, as Telly earnestly seduces a very young, very trusting-looking girl in her bedroom, flanked by medals and stuffed animals. Immediately afterward, he spits gleefully in her parents’ house and then rejoins Casper, who has been waiting that morning on the front stoop reading a comic book called Hate. Telly brags about his conquest, mean-spiritedly and in explicit detail. Then he and Casper move on to urinating in the street, stealing beer, harassing an Asian grocer, stopping by a graffiti-lined crash pad to smoke dope and watch skateboarding videos, and engaging in an enthusiastic round-table discussion about oral sex.
Like every other activity in Kids, sex is made to sound dispiriting and devalued. The film’s young characters have such license to indulge themselves that there’s nothing left for them to enjoy. And as Mr. Clark deftly intercuts the boys’ conversation with equally frank talk from their girlfriends, he emphasizes an utter lack of communication between the sexes. It’s only the boys’ side of this equation that Kids really understands.
The plot of this deceptively casual-looking film is set in motion by Jennie (Chloe Sevigny), who has taken an AIDS test only because she was in the company of Ruby (Rosario Dawson), a more promiscuous friend. Actually, Jennie has had sex only with Telly, who prides himself so vocally on his skill at deflowering virgins. But Jennie’s H.I.V.-positive test result, which she learns about early in the film’s 24-hour time span, turns Telly from an obnoxious Don Juan into an agent of death. The rest of Kids watches the characters’ woozy meanderings as Telly zeroes in on his next girl, while Jennie frantically looks for Telly to tell him what he’s done.
The film’s young screenwriter, Harmony Korine, and many of its actors came to Mr. Clark’s attention as he avidly observed New York’s skateboard culture, which holds a fascination for him that Kids captures only in part. Mr. Korine writes wall-to-wall profane street talk with obvious enthusiasm, though the occasional contrived-sounding scene (like Jennie’s encounter with a sympathetic cabbie) breaks his dialogue’s grueling spell.
The untrained actors echo the screenplay’s naturalism, and they have none of the feral posturing that often makes tough teen-agers seem glamorous on screen. These kids aren’t stylish, pretty or terribly expressive; Mr. Fitzpatrick’s word-slurring Telly isn’t even easy to hear. But they are frighteningly familiar. You could find their counterparts on any New York corner, and if you see Kids, you’ll never look at them in the same way again.
Kids transcends ethnic and economic categories with a racially mixed, mostly white cast that seems to have moved past most of the usual stereotypes. A scene in which a black skateboarder is beaten savagely by a mostly white crowd, for instance, plays as something beyond a racial incident; it plays as something worse. Moments earlier, the mob has taunted an interracial gay couple, and when violence erupts in a staccato fury, it’s clear these rootless, macho skateboarders are simply itching for a fight. The depth of this malaise is much scarier than prejudice alone.
Mr. Clark offers neither analysis nor prognosis, but he stunningly captures a world beyond ordinary taboos. In this film’s atmosphere, casual viciousness comes easily and fills all sorts of glaring gaps in the characters’ lives. The very saddest of the lost characters in Kids are the little brothers, seen here sampling drugs, watching enviously at parties and trying to keep up with the tough talk. They’ve barely reached puberty and are already drifting into the older boys’ decadent, irreversible extremes.
Kids culminates in a prolonged and ghastly party scene that builds up to an unforgettable image of sexual despair. It involves Casper, who is played well and almost sympathetically by Mr. Pierce, despite some horrifying behavior, and who seems the one character in Kids with any hint of a future. But Mr. Clark makes it sickeningly clear that nobody in Kids has much to look forward to. These kids’ future is empty, and their future is now.
Kids was originally rated NC-17, but the film’s distributor is exercising the option of releasing it unrated. It begins and ends with explicit sexual situations involving nudity. But its original rating had more to do with nonstop profanity, drug use, very graphic sexual references and an overall rawness that will be extremely disturbing to some teen-agers. It will disturb adults as well.
Review courtesy of The New York Times