By the end of middle school, I'd probably watched it half a dozen times. That VHS-stamped NC-17-was an item of totemic value to us, illicitly conjured into being by one of our older brothers and only watched in this one house on these rare nights.

It's definitely not-it's actually richly colored-but it gives off the impression of grain and grit, from head to toe. And Clark shot them in a cinema verite style that I somehow remembered as being black-and-white until I rewatched it recently. or Neutrogena-commercial-perfect Jennifer Love Hewitts of the time. Fitzpatrick and Sevigny and Justin Pierce (Casper) and all the others-they looked nothing like the pomaded Freddie Prinze Jrs.

Chloe Sevigny (Jennie) was a teen from a wealthy Connecticut suburb, cutting school and making her way down to Tompkins to sell her knitted hats. Before director Larry Clark plucked him out of obscurity and made him notorious, Leo Fitzpatrick (who played 16-year-old Telly) was just a Jersey kid taking the bus into Manhattan with his board, hanging out in Washington Square. Kids starred mostly amateurs making their acting debuts. We probably caught it at just the right time: old enough to understand what was going on, young enough to be impressed by it and gloss over all the film's brutality. And here was proof that just across the river, real kids more or less our age were steering their skateboards right into the menace and possibility of the world. There we were, in a second-floor bedroom in a middle-class commuter community in New Jersey, ensconced in safety but also docility. I first watched Kids the way most 11-year-olds lucky enough to see it in 1996 did: on a worn-out VHS, slack-jawed and with one eye on the door.

Kids 1995 cast