For a man who had just won the grand prize at the Rome film festival last month, Larry Clark was in a cranky mood. As he took to the stage to receive the Best Film award for Marfa Girl, his acceptance speech veered into a rant: “I’ve been fucked by everybody in Hollywood,” Clark announced to the bejeweled closing gala audience. “In Hollywood things don’t always work out” translated the unflappable interpreter for the Italian audience. “I’ve been fucked by producers and distributors and everyone that looks you straight in the eye and shakes your hand and lies to you,” the director continued, as he explained why this film will be viewable exclusively as paid stream ($5.95) via his official website: larryclark.com. “This is the future and the future is now…So all of us old farts who are crying about 35mm: ‘oh my God film is dead…’ well you can either die with it or you can move forward and I’m moving forward and I’m gonna be with the kids.” Yes, the kids, always the kids.

Mercedes Maxwell and Adam Mediano between takes. Photo by Morgan Jenkins.

In this instance the photographer/director frames his band of photogenic stoners and skaters on the backdrop of the unlikely hick/art-colony town of Marfa. The hard scrabble, West Texas hamlet that became a desert destination for artists and New York-types after Donald Judd purchased several buildings there in ’71 to show his sculptures. Marfa Girl is ostensibly in part about the awkward cohabitation of hipster and hick in this windswept trailer park-artist colony. As the film opens a couple of Latino stoner teens are smoking a joint next to the train depot when they are set upon by border patrol agents. The one who gets thrown in the police car and driven home to his hippie single mom is Adam, played by actual Hispanic skater kid and Marfa resident Adam Mediano, whom Clark credits for inspiring the film after their chance encounter a year ago. The rest of the movie unspools from there with the barest of plots. Basically Adam and his buds smoke dope, play in a band, score some more weed, hang out, get regularly harassed by Homeland Security agents that apparently have little else to do, and bum around at each others houses. There are chicks too, girlfriends, skater groupies, young single moms, New Age types and the titular girl (Drake Brunette) a 20-something art student whose residency at the Judd Foundation apparently involves a lot of hanging out, drawing and/or fucking young boys, with a preference for the latter. In the meantime Adam is pretty busy getting busy with his girlfriend Erica and older woman/single mom Donna (Indigo Rael) whose boyfriend is away for a stretch in the big house. Behind the sexual ennui is the suggestion of social commentary: “Marfa, Texas is kind of a microcosm of what’s going on in the country,” said Clark in Rome, “there’s a lot of racism there against Hispanics, against brown people. It’s a town that’s kinda like a throwback to the ’50s, where they still paddle kids in high school.” Yep and you know there’s a paddling scene in the film although it’s more like a spread from Spanking magazine than an indictment of educational abuse. To be fair, this is not social filmmaking; it’s Larry Clark, and the “political” elements are broadly sketched, basically the hippies and kids vs. the “bad lieutenant” border agents who are also mostly Latino (Marfa Girl engages the agents debate on border protection and race identity—before dropping acid with them for a night of psychedelic sex and merry miscegenation). As Clark explained to Italian Rolling Stone: “[in Marfa] Artists, Mexicans, cops, cowboys. They all get stoned and fuck each other.”

Yes, in case you haven’t heard, Larry Clark is big on fucking, and teenagers. And big on teenagers fucking. But is it art? Well, yes, it is. And even with a penchant toward glamour shots that occasionally gets in the way, Clark is nothing if not coherent with his vision as he gazes on these marginal human landscapes, creating a poetic space out of adolescent indolence. Oh and he’s got a chip on his shoulder, especially about the principal of his star’s high school who nixed his travel to Rome in the company of such a “perv” director. “Now I’ve never met this woman and she stopped Adam at the last minute from coming and it would have been the experience of his lifetime; a 16-year-old that’s never been out of Texas. And this woman slandered me and stopped him from coming. Now Will Rogers said ‘I never met a man I didn’t like’ and my inspiration, Lenny Bruce, said ‘I never met a dyke I didn’t like,’ and I never met this woman and…and…Fuck her!” concluded Clark as the festival director visibly fidgeted at his side. “I do not agree with her position” recited the official interpreter. We can only surmise what Sen. Chris Dodd, president of the MPAA and esteemed guest of the festival sitting in the audience must have thought of this particular American triumph.