While I suspect he's a bit of, ahem, a handful in real life, Larry Clark is always a director for whom I've had much admiration. I was absolutely floored by Kids, and Bully remains an underappreciated gem. He's able to dig into the psyches of adolescents in a non-pandering fashion, and if his worldview is seemingly bruised and bleak beyond repair, that aligns only too perfectly with how we frequently feel as teenagers.

Actually, one may want to put a stay on assigning a single, tonal adjective to Clark's work after checking out Wassup Rockers, the latest of his voyeuristic forays into teenage alienation and sexual acting out. Taking as its motley crew of protagonists a group of long-haired skateboarders from the South Central Los Angeles ghetto, the film is a freewheeling and surprisingly upbeat and lighthearted affair. As with all of Clark’s movies, there’s a verité immediacy to the proceedings. Unfortunately, unlike those two aforementioned in-your-face gems, there’s also a certain indistinctness that marks it down.

Based around the real-life experiences of its five stars (including quietly charismatic Jonathan Velasquez, acerbic Francisco “Kico” Pedrasa and chubby Milton Velasquez, derided by his peers as “Spermball”), Wassup Rockers charts a skipped school day in the life of these “Latino Ramones” — black-clad, tight-pants-wearing punk aficionados who, constantly harassed for being different, fight to be themselves. Along with a few friends, the group takes a series of busses up to Beverly Hills to skateboard. There, hassled by the police, targeted by residents and seduced by two schoolgirls (Laura Cellner and Jessica Steinbaum) who spark as much to their ethnicity as their scruffiness, the boys must navigate a surrealistic maze of mock-danger and try to return to the air-quote safety of their own impoverished burg.

Clark’s films typically have a roughhewn quality, but here he somewhat eschews the handheld nihilism of his earlier work for a few more staged and rooted shots. He still has his cinematic, fetishistic affection for skinny, shirtless teen boys and pouty, jailbait girls (in Clark’s world, everyone under 21 is a sexual magnet) and there’s his usual discerning eye for quick, shorthand detail — from the dirty crasher’s den that’s perfect in its name-brand-less anonymity to a scene where one character’s mother returns home in the morning with a wad of single dollar bills. The kids, too, are all right — they have a natural charm.

But something about Wassup Rockers feels reductive, perhaps because there’s so little individual insight into the characters. There’s no doubt legitimacy to the tension between the Latino “rockers” of the title and their neighborhood’s African-Americans, as well as the preppy teens they encounter in Beverly Hills, but things here feel paradoxically authentic as well as staged. The settings are grungily accurate — save for when we enter tonier territory — and the crew eventually achieves a sort of collective wounded grace and place in our memory (Clark is a superb caster, as the careers of Kids alums Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny attest), but Wassup Rockers is also beset with clownish, wildly farcical elements that ring false.

In his positive review, I believe Roger Ebert called this "Larry Clark's Ferris Bueller's Day Off," or at least compared the two films. And that's a discerning and entirely apt point of reference. The films share the same sense of freewheeling adventurism. A key difference, I would argue, is that while the adults of Ferris' world almost all present obstacles and are frequently portrayed as derisible, they come off as emblematic of the way the film's teens see adults. In Wassup Rockers, there's a seesaw quality to the tone and pitch that is at first merely disorienting, and then eventually invites greater displeasure.

We know the kids aren’t Mexican, as they constantly have to remind various folks they encounter, but they do come across as emblems of a cultural minority that Clark seems to want to flog and celebrate by merely contrasting with buffoonish subsets from other races. By the time Janice Dickinson, in a weird cameo, is electrocuted in a tub after attempting to seduce Kico, you’re left wondering exactly whose view of Los Angeles Wassup Rockers represents.

Clark's defense of this comes in an engaging and interesting audio commentary track that serves as the DVD's crown jewel supplemental extra, alongside extra behind-the-scenes footage and a collection of trailers. In this track, Clark talks about his influences for the movie, his sense of visual style and also how he wanted to both ground and exalt the rituals of his young charges by exaggerating and stereotyping the air-quote mainstream characters in the piece. Listening to this, I found myself coming around a bit — agreeing with what he was saying and seeing a greater aim to the work — even if I ultimately don't think he entirely pulls it off. The film is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with English 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo audio tracks, plus English and Spanish subtitles. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)