“This is disgusting material that panders to paedophile fantasies,” went one prominent Liberal Democrat MP in 1996, amid the UK release of Kids, an artful bit of pubescent scuzz that had already horrified its fans and its detractors on the other side of the Atlantic one year earlier. Britain loves an opportunity for performative outrage – even more so back then. This was the same year, it’s worth noting, that the Daily Mail reacted to the release of David Cronenberg’s kinky thriller Crash with trademark composure: “Ban This Car Crash Sex Film”, its front page blared. But the Kids controversy isn’t one we can look back on now, heads in collective hands, mortified that we took it all quite so seriously. For Kids was, is and (hopefully, at least) always will be a pungent provocation; a grimly nihilistic portrait of wayward youth that revels in its own eagerness to disgust. On this occasion, the Lib Dems may have had a point.
The brainchild of director Larry Clark – king of lecherous photo books with titles such as Teenage Lust – and a 19-year-old screenwriter wunderkind cum professional upset merchant named Harmony Korine, Kids strived to present the “truth” of young urban life in the Nineties. It’s an unvarnished, often deeply disturbing tale of feral, lascivious and perma-stoned teens (and barely-teens), whose lives are a seemingly endless parade of rape, sickness and chaos.
“Virgins, I love ’em,” goes 16-year-old Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) early into Kids. “No stank. No diseases. No nothin’. Just pure pleasure.” Telly, a vulgar, skinny punk, has just convinced a 12-year-old girl to have sex with him (an extreme close-up of the pair making out, mouths grimly, sloppily colliding, opens the film). Now he’s spending the day lolling around Manhattan’s skate parks telling his best friend Casper (Justin Pierce) all about it, extolling grotesque life lessons in between demands to smell his fingers.
Across town, one of his recent conquests, the pretty Jennie (Chloë Sevigny), is diagnosed with HIV – something only Telly could have given her. Telly doesn’t know he’s positive, therefore neither do the many young virgins he’s been preying upon of late. So Jennie ventures into the city looking for him. It doesn’t go well.
Kids turns 30 years old on 21 July, a milestone that feels almost blackly comic. The kids of Kids are now mums and movie stars (Sin City’s Rosario Dawson, along with Sevigny, were catapulted to indie-cool fame in its wake). Some of them died decades ago. Korine is today peddling ghastly AI guff, long having graduated with honours from the Vincent Gallo School of Thrilling Young Rabble-Rouser Turned Middle-Aged Bore. Clark and his long-standing interest in adolescent flesh have largely faded from the cultural consciousness, too, which is probably for the best. And Kids itself feels different – still jolting, of course, but also strained and a little too hungry for your outrage; the cinematic equivalent of that satirical headline in The Onion about Marilyn Manson going door-to-door shocking strangers.
Upon release in 1995, the film typically got the response it was looking for. Clark was repeatedly questioned over the ages of some of the disturbingly young-looking, non-professional actors involved in the film’s most extreme material, responding repeatedly with different shades of wishy-washiness. The New Yorker dubbed the movie “nihilistic pornography”, and its buyers at Miramax Films (yes, sound the Harvey Weinstein claxon!) fully leaned into its inherent scandal-making: first by setting up a fake, one-time-only distributor to circumvent the fact that Miramax’s owners at Disney refused to distribute films given NC-17 certificates (the US equivalent of an X), then limiting press interviews by the film’s cast, all the better to suggest Kids was in fact a documentary.
You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity, and Kids was an arthouse smash, grossing $20m on a budget of $1.5m. But its legacy has been complicated. Fitzpatrick has spoken in contemporary interviews about the trauma of being so deeply associated – and at such a young age – with a despicable character many viewers thought was really him. Pierce and the professional skateboarder Harold Hunter, one of the film’s standout supporting players, received industry acclaim post-Kids but struggled to maintain acting careers. Both men were dead within 11 years of the film’s release, Pierce by suicide and Hunter in an overdose. A 2021 documentary about the film, titled We Were Once Kids, also claimed that many of the young people in the movie were barely paid and left to more or less fend for themselves amid instant notoriety and criticism.
Anyone who shared photos and god-awful poetry to Tumblr in the Noughties will instantly recognise the most arresting of Kids’ images (Sevigny in a taxi driver’s mirror; Sevigny drugged in a lift; Pierce naked, stunned and asking what the hell just happened), all of which were shared and re-shared like generational totems. But the film’s storytelling has tended to get lost amid the visuals – other “kids gone bad” movies of the Nineties, among them the campy Dangerous Liaisons adaptation Cruel Intentions and Todd Solondz’s sensationally cynical Welcome to the Dollhouse, have enjoyed far more sustained appeal over the decades. And that’s despite both of those films being awash in the same kind of jet-black provocation as Kids, from mockery of sexual assault to casual misogyny and homophobia.
Perhaps, then, Kids ultimately suffered for its humourlessness. It is an unrelentingly bleak film, with any semblance of hope or levity keenly evaporated as it goes on. It treats Aids as a horror movie villain, doling it out as karmic punishment or as a kind of sick joke. bell hooks, the feminist scholar, argued in 1997 that Kids, for all its “dangerous, daring, look-away-but-also-look” bravado, was in fact a deeply conservative film in its understanding of sex, race and gender. “It’s just another sad moment where people are seduced by transgression in and of itself, as though transgression makes you radical and not what you are transgressing in the service of.” If you watch Kids in 2025, long detached from the more sensationalist dialogue it sparked in 1995, it’s hard to disagree with her.
At least, though, the power of its performances remain: the elfin tragedy Sevigny brings to Jennie; Dawson’s remarkably convincing self-possession for someone merely spotted on a New York street and asked if she wanted to be in a movie; the ghoulish authenticity of Fitzpatrick, Pierce and Hunter, the latter pair deserving far more than their short lives offered them. It’s the kids of Kids that make it worth seeking out. If watched between your fingers. And occasionally on mute.
