Larry Clark
Wassup Rockers

With the intent of exploring - in an almost entirely chronological manner - the filmography of Larry Clark, I approached Wassup Rockers with the vivid and clear image of two of his previous films: the debut, Kids, and one of the subsequent ones, Ken Park.

For those unfamiliar with the director in question, Clark is a controversial character first in photography and then in cinema, consecrated by a 1976 photographic project called Tulsa (from the namesake city in Oklahoma), whose attempt was to narrate - through strong and strictly black-and-white images - the reality of drug addicts (of which he was also a part) from his hometown.

A raw realism, in short, that scandalized and perhaps also intrigued American society of the time, and which is reflected many years later in his cinematographic works, primarily the aforementioned Kids (1995).

Those familiar with Clark's films know that the underlying theme, the fil rouge connecting each of his works, is the attempt to depict a social, economic, and relational degradation of adolescents and teenagers dealing with drugs, sex, and interpersonal relationships; all this on a consistently well-defined backdrop, that of skateboarding and punk music.

The protagonists of Wassup Rockers are no exception: they are all skaters (all Latin-American) and attempt to continue a homemade punk rock band, in the classic garage of their suburb. The elements we might describe as “background” remain unchanged, while the plot attempts to develop a new issue for Clark: the contrast and opposition between the kids from the Los Angeles ghetto and their counterparts from Beverly Hills. The classic dichotomy, then, between rich and poor, narrated by hours and hours of filmography and a rather thorny issue, especially when the attempt is to develop an original point of view.

Clark tries a different approach, as his characters are between fourteen and seventeen years old, and can move with relative freedom in dialogues and movements, just as the adolescents of the director have always done, in sequences that seem more like real documentary extracts - and indeed many dialogues are improvised - than acted scenes.

Clark's attempt, however, cannot be considered entirely successful, for a series of aspects. First of all, the almost forced emphasis placed on the “background” previously mentioned: if punk and skateboarding remain secondary in Kids and Ken Park, with a great play of images showing that this was the daily life of the kids, in Wassup Rockers they assume a prominent role that almost diminishes their meaning. Often there is an impression of aesthetics, a mannerism, when watching very long scenes of skate tricks, which seem extracted from a Vans promotional video. Even the strictly punk soundtrack seems to accentuate this effect, especially with the somewhat forced insertion of hardcore punk (different from the pop punk of Ken Park, for example) that has no reason to be except to attempt to indicate, in theory, the backdrop in which the protagonists move.

A backdrop that, however, becomes even more, unfortunately, the main element - thus collapsing the house of cards of the already fragile plot - when in almost two hours of film the former are spent framing the ghetto environment with at least a poor acting test from the actors (perhaps because they are not native English speakers?) and flat.

All this, thus, leads to the actual plot, that is the fateful encounter of the two different worlds, which happens in a brutal and very unrealistic way: a girl, fascinated by the skater protagonist's backside - Jonathan - invites him into her villa in Hollywood.

The encounter-clash involves the over-discussed issues of widespread crime and rampant poverty in South Los Angeles, in stark contrast with the aforementioned gigantic villa; putting these words in the mouths of the adolescent protagonists devalues them even more, even with the alibi - typical of Clark - of honest and sincere naivety, which here is merely a vehicle for a collection of clichés about the hypocrisy of the rich and the murders in the ghetto, which the kids have always witnessed and are not so surprised by.

The kids face in sequence a series of implausible adventures, where moving from one house to another they manage to only collect failures, brawls, and even a dead friend. But the killing occurs with such tranquility - and the "network of Mexican contacts" that develops immediately after is amusing - that it appears plastic, fake. As fake also seems the death in a bathtub of a rich woman, who welcomes one of the Latinos, in an almost tragicomedy scene.

Even that silly smile of the Latin-Americans towards life is fake, even in the most dramatic moments; in its intentions, it might perhaps show the detachment and adolescent indifference in a reality where it is important for the self to survive, not the group. Yet it fails to convince fully, given the extreme compactness of the group which, however, never breaks, neither in the case of the murdered friend, nor the arrested brother.

Clark thus falters due to a theme not easy to narrate, perhaps beyond his usual chords but still very much alive today as it was in 2005 - the year of the film - and which needed and still needs a mature narrative. A narrative that unfortunately the director cannot provide effectively.

It would have been more interesting, for example, to question the difficult relationship with the black rappers of the ghetto – which is the whole circle around which the moniker rockers revolves - rather than attempting to pose different issues without resolving any of them. The idea, from the already mentioned overused backdrop to fragmentations into issues like the stripper work of one of the skaters' mothers or frequent encounters with the police, is that too many issues were attempted to be brought together, too many hot points, without managing to bring them into a unified design.