Harmony Korine burst onto the scene with his screenplay for Larry Clark's first feature film "Kids" (1995). Discovered by Clark while he was skateboarding in Washington Square Park, Korine had, despite his youth, watched an incredible number of films (to fill the hours of insomnia brought on by Ritalin) and listed among his influences Godard, Herzog and Fellini. He demonstrated his facility with the medium by writing in three weeks the script that (minus a few lines here and there) ended up on screen. His ear for "kidspeak" enabled the middle-aged photographer-turned-director to convincingly capture the attitudes, desires and lack of perspective of his teenage characters. In a bare-bones minimalist style, Clark and Korine presented a cautionary tale about teenage sex in the age of AIDS, focusing on a 24-hour period in the lives of a bunch of Manhattan kids on a hot summer day.
"Gummo" (1997), Korine's directorial debut, abandoned linear storytelling to take an uncompromising look at alienated youth in Middle America. His contemporary Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn navigate their beat-up bikes around a Rust Belt suburban wasteland getting their kicks from sex and glue-sniffing. Set in a fictional, end-of-the-line Xenia, Ohio that has never recovered from the tornado of the early 1970s, "Gummo" veers from scripted performance to self-conscious improvisation to seemingly spontaneous filming of non-actors, sometimes within a single scene, and does not contain a single character who is not weird or deviant. The bizarre figures and grotesque episodes never coalesce to form a meaningful narrative, and the sum of its colorful parts do not add up to a whole movie. This self-styled missing Marx Brother needs more than just faith that a narrative will materialize, but his efforts so far, though immature, make Korine a talent to keep watching.
