The kids are new, but the block isn’t

IN 1991, the rapper Ice Cube recorded “How to Survive In South Central,” an instruction manual for working-class black life in a Los Angeles neighborhood he called “the concrete Vietnam.” The film the song was featured in, John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood,” helped fix the public image of South-Central as a gangsta zone of black violence and urban struggle, an image only heightened by skewed media coverage of the 1992 riots that made the area synonymous with black unrest.

The truth, though, was that South-Central was on its way to becoming the nearly 70% Latino neighborhood it is today. If Cube were to rerecord “How to Survive in South Central” for 2006, he’d have to reach for a new cast of characters -- Central American immigrants, second-generation Mexican Americans -- and lyrics that flip between Spanish and English. Hip-hop is still part of the South-Central soundtrack, but so is the hard-core punk of Latino bands such as South Central Riot Squad and the Revolts. Playing as many backyard parties as formal club shows, they’ve helped make the neighborhood one of the key hubs of the California punk scene (just check out the hundreds of images and band links on photographer Kevin McCarty’s website dedicated to the scene, www.imnotlikeyou.la).

It is this South-Central that is buried somewhere at the heart of Larry Clark’s film “Wassup Rockers,” which opens June 30. Part cinema verite and part social farce, “Wassup Rockers” follows a group of Latino skate punks led by Jonathan Velazquez and Francisco “Kiko” Pedrasa as they leave behind their South-Central routine (school, skating, band practice) for a hyperbolic comedy of errors that finds them skating amok through the streets of Beverly Hills. Fictional documentary quickly becomes outlandish satire, and Clark unleashes a rogue’s gallery of white characters -- Beverly Hills prep bullies lifted from the set of an old John Hughes movie, a swishy gay predator (played by corn-rowed fashion designer Jeremy Scott), and Janice Dickinson as a Hollywood lush who wants Pedrasa in her hot tub.

On the surface, it’s all just another variation on the theme of teen voyeurism that Clark, 62, has been perfecting for decades. He likes to watch teenagers kiss and kill, skateboard and have sex, get high and be bored. We know this from the photography collections that earned him a bad-boy seat at the art-world table -- 1971’s “Tulsa” and 1983’s “Teenage Lust” -- but mostly from films like 1995’s “Kids” (about New York City teens) and 2001’s “Bully” (about Florida teens) that were early barometers of the pierced-navel world we now live in: the youth-culture obsessions of reality TV, the slick commercialization of punk rebellion, the adolescent sexual leering of myspace.com and American Apparel.

“Wassup Rockers” is still fixated on teenagers -- complete with Clark’s typical close-ups of nipples, curved hips and pouting lips -- but not in the same way that “Kids” was. The kids of “Kids” were white, black and Latino, but race was never discussed; they were all equally young, equally alienated and equally plagued by bad choices. In “Wassup Rockers,” Clark has decided that race trumps age -- Velazquez, Pedrasa and the rest of the crew are not simply kids, they are brown kids, Central American and Salvadoran teenagers from South-Central, or as Pedrasa repeats over and over, “the ghetto.” That is all the city will let them be. Everywhere they go, someone’s reminding them that they’re racial outsiders, whether it’s the black students at Alain Leroy Locke High School, who have no role beyond being the Latinos’ antagonists, or the clownish white cops on the Westside who won’t let them skate the stairs of Beverly Hills High. Everyone mocks Velazquez and his crew for their tight jeans and long hair (hence the derogatory “Rockers” tag) and, in one of the film’s better nuances, they are constantly mistaken for Mexicans.

Yet being Latino is also all that Clark will let them be. The film may be based on their real lives (Clark began interviewing them a few years ago and the film even opens with his interview of Velazquez as a squirming 14-year-old), but the screenplay is his, and it drips with awkward racial fetishism. When Velazquez undresses in front of a white girl in Beverly Hills, she remarks, “You’re not circumcised,” and he responds matter-of-factly, “No. I’m Latino.” The boys spend most of the film speaking as emblems of otherness, and we learn little about who they are beyond who Clark needs them to be: Latino punks from the ghetto who like to skate. When did their families come to the U.S.? What do their parents think of their music? Do they even like punk rock?

They are so naturally engaging and likable -- both as screen personalities and as real-life kids -- that they deserve far more than what “Wassup Rockers” intends to give. Clark may turn them into indie film stars and get their faces emblazoned on hip Shepherd Fairey posters, but by the end of the film, the truth of their lives and their city remains nearly as unknown as it was before the cameras ever began to roll.