Retrospective Film Review

Kids (1995) • 25 Years Later

A day in the life of a group of teens as they travel around New York City skating, drinking, smoking and deflowering virgins.

Larry Clark’s Kids isn’t an enjoyable or entertaining film, in the normal sense. Its characters are almost uniformly unattractive; the boys are dedicated to exploiting the girls, and the girls themselves aren’t much better. And they’re sketches rather than full portraits; although they seem very real, we learn little about them.

There isn’t even much of a plot, just two nominal quests for Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), who longs to seduce two virgins in a single day, and Jennie (Chloë Sevigny), who needs to give Telly bad news. Those provide a basic storytelling structure, but they’re not truly what the film’s about. Kids is mostly impressionistic digressions. Even the dialogue has a thrust and mood that matters more than its words. Yet Kids is, as Rolling Stone put it, “the most notorious teen movie ever made.”

Its notoriety comes from the extreme frankness in how it depicts the New York kids it follows over…