Kids

1995, Larry Clark, USA

Rating: R18 Runtime: 91 minutes
Content note: Sexual assault, racism, exploitation of minors

Follow a group of New York City teenagers over a 24-hour period as they traverse the city, skating, convening in parks, riding the subway, partying, using drugs and having sex.

Kids was scripted by 19-year-old Harmony Korine (Gummo, Spring Breakers) who Clark encountered skating at Washington Square Park. The result was a film that polarised critics and audiences: many lauded Korine and Clark’s film as an unflinching slice-of-life, while others found it sensationalist, indulgent and hyperbolic.

As a result, Kids oscillates between extremes for the viewer: at one end, an almost cinéma vérité documentary of the urban American teenager in their natural environment, and at the other, a breathless exploitation flick by fashion photographer-turned director Larry Clark dog-whistling to the moral majority.

Launching the careers of Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry) and Rosario Dawson (Sin City), Kids is at times gruelling and unrelenting, but ultimately remains an important film – nearly 30 years after its initial release.

“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 far too serious to be tarred as exploitation, and its extremism is both artful and devastatingly effective.”
– Janet Maslin, The New York Times