Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A group of teenagers in South Florida enact a murder plot against their mutual bully, Bobby, who has emotionally, physically, and sexually abused them for years.
Larry Clark's Bully is a genuinely unsettling and distinctive piece of American transgressive cinema. Based on the true story of Bobby Kent's murder, the film brings Clark's unflinching, voyeuristic eye to suburban Florida youth culture — capturing the aimlessness, sexual volatility, and moral vacancy of its teenage subjects with uncomfortable authenticity. The novelty is real: Clark's naturalistic, almost documentary approach to extreme subject matter gives the film a singular, disturbing texture few films match. The acting from the young ensemble (including Nick Stahl, Brad Renfro, and Rachel Miner) is raw and credible, if uneven. Cinematography is functional but effective in its sun-bleached, oppressive Florida aesthetic. The plot, while compelling in its true-crime inevitability, occasionally loses momentum in its repetitive degeneracy. The ending, depicting the teens' arrest and fates, is appropriately grim but somewhat anticlimactic given the buildup.