After stirring much controversy with his screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine doubled down on his unsparing view of down-and-out youth with his 1997 feature directorial debut, Gummo. Set in Xenia, Ohio, but shot in the derelict outskirts of Korine’s childhood hometown of Nashville, the film depicts the corners of America that go neglected to the point of ruin. Even the setting of Xenia is telling: Gummo takes place in the present, but the opening narration by Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) focuses on the massive 1974 tornado that devastated the town, and one gets the sense from images of dilapidated buildings and masses of junk littering yards and streets that the area never recovered.

Deliberately eschewing a linear narrative that might have brought a larger thematic structure to the film, Korine instead arranges Gummo as a series of vignettes that allows for perspective to switch between characters like a baton.