Wassup Rockers

"I wanted to have fun and fuck with the white people in Beverly Hills." — Larry Clark

Wassup Rockers, Larry Clark's new film, breaks from his obsessive chronicling of desperate and sexually unhinged teenage lives just when the issue was growing stale, and delivers attractive and socially redeeming fare about race, class and being a Latino immigrant in the U.S.

The Rockers in question are El Salvadorian and Guatemalan skate punks in South Central, 13- to 16-year-olds who wear their hair long and their pants tight, and whose daily lives are a struggle to be themselves without getting beat up in their hip hop neighborhood. Perhaps Clark understands that poor immigrants tend to be linguistically and culturally isolated from the mainstream and that they are seen by a certain part of the American mainstream as lettuce pickers, landscapers, job-stealers, the 20 men living in a four bedroom house, and, sometimes, the corpses found huddled in puddles of shade in the desert near the border.

Wassup Rockers de-alienates these kids in a two-pronged attack. The first half is a documentary of uniquely adolescent and recognizably American stories about fighting, playing in a punk band and awkward sexual experiences, told while the camera lingers over their shirtless bodies and full lips (hey, it's still Larry Clark).

The film is also a stereotype-challenging exploration of identity politics, as the kids' hair and clothes make them outsiders even within South Central, an area Clark claims to understand. "There is a big section of LA that is isolated. You ask white people about South Central and they say 'you'll get killed don't go there.' You wouldn't know about the racial politics of the ghetto unless you were out there," Clark tells me during an interview in New York City.

Then Clark decided to get them to Beverly Hills to have fun and "fuck with the white people" in a variety of stock settings -- Beverly Hills High girls' bedrooms, a trendsetter party, a tragic turn in the backyard of an armed Dirty Harry / Charlton Heston doppelganger, and the bathtub of a supermodel. The film is a glimpse of the class war and race war as they tease out in daily real life. The boys leave their ghetto for a neighborhood where brown people are unwelcome except as servants, are fetishized in the white girls' mansion, kicked out by the girls' boyfriends, and hassled, baited and arrested by a white cop while skating.

Clark found Kiko, 15, and Porky, 18, two of the Rockers, while on a photo shoot on Venice Beach for the French release of his previous skate film, the more disturbing and narratively obtuse Ken Park, which is still unreleased in the states, allegedly due to clearance issues.

"Kiko and Porky looked totally different, with their long hair and tight pants and shoes falling apart and taped up and painted. They just had this style. They said they were from the ghetto, from South Central." Clark photographed them for four days and met the rest of their friends, including his star, the photogenic Jonathan, 15, who is portrayed in the film as the requisite boy who gets tons of play. "I took them a copy of the magazine with the photo spread when it came out, and they called me the next Saturday morning, saying 'come get us, it's time to go skating!' Every Saturday for the next year we'd go skating together. It became our day. I always showed up, I was reliable, and they got to know me and I got to know them. I got all the stories of their lives in South Central. Then, as the idea for the film came together, I assured them the film would happen."

The kids are not actors -- they've never even worked -- so Clark relies on his undisputed skill as a photographer and relentless visual seduction until we acquiesce to their giggling and looking off camera through the whole film. And the skating isn't shot with a typical skate video fisheye lens that exaggerates distance and danger. The immediacy and intimacy of the footage of them attempting the nine steps, doing choreographed skates through their neighborhood, horsing around in a playground, most of it shot in golden late afternoon light, is heartbreakingly beautiful.