Baby Killers
A gritty director can't handle this dark milieu.

BULLY
With Brad Renfro, Nick Stahl, Bijou Phillips, Michael Pitt
Screenplay by Zachary Long and Roger Pullis
Directed by Larry Clark

LARRY CLARK REGISTERED his first blip on the indie-cinema radar in 1995 with Kids, a stark and brash docu-style drama about a callous teenaged boy who screws himself and others to death in New York City. In Bully, Clark's new story of wayward teens, the kids are still not alright: This time, they live in sunny, infamous Broward County, Fla., and come from middle-class families -- although they might just as well have no parents at all.

Worse yet, their dysfunctional clique revolves too much around Bobby (Nick Stahl), a repressed homosexual who lures women into ultra-violent sex, and who uses his life-long friend Marty (Brad Renfro) as a punching bag onto whom he unleashes his sexual confusion. Marty's a sweet kid, not terribly bright, and not confident enough to sever his friendship with self-loathing Bobby, who scrubs his hands clean like Lady Macbeth and spits at his own naked image in the bathroom mirror.

As with most bullies, Bobby steps down and apologizes for his abuse when Marty throws a defensive punch back at him. It's not enough. Before long Marty's new girlfriend, Lisa (Rachel Miner), who's pregnant and in love with her tormented boy, comes up with the idea of murdering Bobby because "he's the source of everybody's troubles." (Her assertion is naïve and melodramatic -- or else just very badly written.)

It doesn't take Marty long to agree, and soon the virgin assassins recruit some advisers and assistants: a local thug who hangs out with a gang of delinquent baby teens (the next generation of trouble); Lisa's chunky, hulking friend Derek, who's just glad to give a back rub to a hot babe; her friend Ali (Bijou Phillips), whom Bobby has already treated to some brutal sex; and the pasty, amoral Donny (Michael Pitt), who enjoys having clothespins attached to his nipples, and who totally gets off on the idea of clubbing Bobby to death with a baseball bat.

Their inept scheme, which they hatch in a Pizza Hut, leads to a grisly climax. And then, with the conspirators sworn -- in someone else's blood -- to an alibi and an everlasting secrecy, everything naturally falls apart with lightning speed.

This is all superb dramatic grist, even more so because it's based on fact. But for at least half of Bully, I kept fighting the sensation that Clark wasn't the best miller to make something of it. His movie has none of the lean, incisive complexity of a drama like Boys Don't Cry, and usually he can't seem to decide whether he's staging a morality tale or observing a slice of life.

His sex is blunt and dirty because it needs to be. But does he also need to show his actress sitting on the toilet, wiping herself, and then walking naked from the bathroom? He fawns over flesh just for the sake of it, and his directorial bullying feels even more unnecessary when you begin to notice how carefully he protects his male performers, cutting them off at the waist with a courtesy he doesn't show his women.

The patchy script for Bully -- written by Zachary Long and Roger Pullis, and based on Jim Schutze's novel about the true-life incident -- often catches the cadence of its young characters' vacant quasi-communication. It's just as often clumsy and didactic, especially when we hear from the parents, who walk around in a fog of denial that's usually too extreme to believe.

Clark isn't a very sophisticated filmmaker, and at times Bully grinds along on sheer shock value. That's not always a bad thing: When the kids talk about killing Bobby as if planning a trip to the mall, or when they can't keep their mouths shut after doing the deed, Bully feels disturbingly authentic. Clark also has an unpretentious visual sense of how co-dependent young people loll about and waste their lives on each other, especially when they have no mature role models to guide them.

You just have to cut through a bit of awkward filmmaking to find these strains in Bully, which Clark tells from a coolly objective point of view. The pointless quagmire of Bobby's sexuality lingers about his character, but he's not as hard to figure out as Clark wants us to think. In one equivocal scene, Bobby knocks Lisa off Marty by slapping her with a leather belt, and then he dives onto the bed and seems to mount his buddy. That's when Clark abruptly cuts away, leaving you to wonder why he just doesn't tell us what we need to know and show us some consequences.

The actresses in Bully give largely affectless performances, perhaps because Clark doesn't provide much help. He gets better work from his more experienced actors: Renfro (Apt Pupil) as the heartbreaking Marty, who sobs and drools when he talks about his anguish; Pitt (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) as Donny, the sickly funny freakazoid stoner; and Stahl (The Man Without a Face) , whose arrogant menacing scowl deserves to die. They leave you with a disturbing, graphic, uneven movie that sincerely wants to say something about squandered young lives, but that fell into the hands of a director who doesn't know how.