In 1995, Harmony Korine and Lenny Clarke unleashed Kids onto American cinema. It was a raw, brutal, street-level, almost stream-of-consciousness exploration of the (then) modern lives of teenagers in the big city (in this case, New York) as they screwed and drugged their way through an era of AIDS and youth-on-youth gang violence. It was harrowing and ugly and unflinching and mesmerizing, and nearly 10 years later, it looks like British culture finally caught up to us in the States, because in 2004, Menhaj Huda and Noel Clarke came out with Kidulthood, and although I'd seen parts of it online, it was only recently released on DVD in the U.S., so I sat down to watch it for the first time the full way through in one sitting.

From Kevin Smith to Quentin Tarantino, roughly the past decade and a half of modern cinema is littered with filmmakers who are probably not even aware of Robert McKee's three-act dictates of storytelling, and while the results of their ignorance can often be ugly, the experiments that yield fruit make the flouting of such supposed rules worthwhile. Like Kids, Kidulthood is told as a series of interweaving vignettes, contained (only barely) by an extremely finite space of time - in both movies, it's little more than a snapshot of a day (or two) in the lives of presumably "average," and therefore deeply troubled, inner-city teens - in which the ensemble cast of characters' stories connect up like a Mandelbrot set.

Trevor is considering going into business for his gangster uncle. Alisa is pregnant by Trevor. Becky is trying to get Alisa to go to a party with her, and is sucking and fucking her way through multiple adult guys to score drugs and cash enough for clothes to wear to the party. Trevor's friend Jay is hooking up with Sam's girl. Sam is a bully who torments Katie into suicide and is out for blood after Trevor, Jay and their friend Moony beat him up in retaliation for his earlier treatment of them. And Katie's suicide has given them all a day off from school, to get into all sorts of trouble before the big party that night.

Oh, and there's a literal Chekhov's gun in the story, too.

As an American, deciphering the dialogue in this one was somewhat akin to watching a Shakespeare play - in both cases, it takes a few minutes at first for my ears to properly "tune up" to the dialects - and seeing the same faces that I remembered from other UK productions was a bit odd. Nicholas Hoult had grown up considerably since I saw him last in About a Boy, although he still seems to be playing slightly dorky guys (in this film, he's the one hosting the party, at his parents' house). By contrast, Noel Clarke did a dynamite job of playing a character who was pretty much the mathematical opposite of Mickey in Doctor Who. His performance as Sam the bully was impressive on a number of levels, not in the least because he also wrote the script, and I'm always mildly surprised and pleased when a screenwriter is willing to cast themselves in such an intentionally unflattering role.

The ultimate irony of both Kids and Kidulthood is that they hammer home what amount to deeply conservative messages - "Oh noes, our childrens is being turned into victims and/or monsters by overly permissive and/or neglectful parents, as well as by an overly sexualized and morally bankrupt media-dominated culture!" - except that the significant amounts of sex and violence in both movies automatically guarantee that such conservatives will be more offended by, and intolerant of, those movies than anyone else.

Consider this a recommendation.