Kids

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Video Type: Film

Description: Larry Clark’s Kids is a brutal film following the lives of a gang of out-of-control teenage skaters in 90s New York. The protagonist, Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), is an HIV-positive skateboarder obsessed with taking the virginity of under-age girls. Calling himself the ‘Virgin Surgeon’, Telly comes across like an inarticulate, baggy-jeaned version of A Clockwork Orange’s Alex DeLarge. While he wanders the city buying weed, drinking and shoplifting, one of his many one-night stands, Jennie (Chloë Sevigny), is trying to track him down to tell him that he has HIV.

Using cinema vérité techniques and featuring scenes of real-life drug use, Kids is an uncomfortable depiction of the dysfunctional lives of these wayward skaters. Clark hung out with such a gang before making the film. The script was written by Harmony Korine, a hyperactive, 19-year-old skate-rat who would go on to gain success in his own right as the director of such controversial films as Gummo (1997) and Spring Breakers (2012). The majority of the cast were fresh-faced skaters with little or no acting experience; a 16-year-old Rosario Dawson among them.

In Kids we see the skateboard weaponised when Casper (Justin Pierce), Telly’s similarly sociopathic sidekick, beats a man to a pulp with his deck to the gentle innocence of Daniel Johnston’s track ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’.

Released: 1995

Category: skateboarding

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