Kids (1995)

Kids arrived in 1995 with the swagger of a film that knew it would be discussed, and it was, at length, by people who mostly disagreed with each other. Larry Clark and Harmony Korine assembled a cast of New York street kids with no acting experience, and the resulting ensemble happens to be multiracial and varied in background. That variety is a byproduct of authentic street casting, not a representation initiative. Rosario Dawson and Harold Hunter are present because they were there, in that city, at that time.

The film's handling of its own subject matter is where the modern sensibility goes quiet. A gay couple appears briefly, only to be taunted and beaten by the skaters, which is a depiction of homophobia, not an endorsement of anything. The gender politics are, by bell hooks's assessment, conservative, and the multiracial cast engages no racial consciousness at all. There is no environmental theme, no critique of capital, no body-affirming project in the pool scene's genital showmanship, no neurodivergence, and no historical revisionism. The HIV thread, as Moira Weigel observed, shrinks a disease into a stylistic device for suspense.

Ebert gave it three and a half stars and admitted the film does not tell us what it means. That refusal to preach is the whole of its moral posture, and it keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. The camera observes. The characters do not learn. Casper wakes naked on the couch asking what happened, and thirty years of discourse have not answered him. What remains is a document of a particular moment, unpleasant, unimproving, and innocent of the pieties that would later be expected of it.