And from those shaggy-dog stories, you get a poignant, cumulative sense of the paradox of Brooklyn, where myriad cultures converge but each rubs the other up the wrong way; and of the Brooklynite's ever-present tension between staying and fleeing, brilliantly exemplified by Lou Reed's monotone monologues (passing his skew-whiff judgement on Sweden, "Sweden scares me Everyone's drunk Everything works"). That frizzy perm, the deadpan delivery, those gags - this guy should be in showbiz.Most of his co-stars already are. You can glimpse such design flaws every now and then in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's film Blue in the Face, but not often enough to ruin your enjoyment of what is a sassy and jubilant slice of on-the-hoof lunacy. Wang and Auster knocked the movie together immediately after completing their previous collaboration, Smoke. Blue in the Face shares a clutch of characters with its sister film - Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel), the jovial owner of the Brooklyn Cigar Company, the New York corner-store, which is the core of both films, leads us through a flurry of unrelated episodes populated by star cameos, backed up by his little trio of chums, notably Tommy (Giancarlo Esposito), a bristlingly funny wolf in chic clothing. Given the picture's ramshackle conception (it was shot in under a week, with the cast riffing before the camera in various hastily-arranged scenarios), the higgledy-piggledy observations which bob to the surface are surprisingly coherent.

Nothing strikes fear into the moviegoer's heart like "improvisation" (except, perhaps, the words ".. starring Charlie Sheen"). Too often this technique, employed to conjure up stretches of fluid, unrestrained cinema, actually creates the opposite - stiffly played, sparsely directed longueurs in which people drink coffee and scream a lot. In the past 20 years we have gone from disbelieving what kids say on principle, to believing what they say - sometimes also on principle. It isn't new for a film about youth to be compromised, but Kids is compromised in some new and unexpected ways.On general release from tomorrow. Yet male adolescence contains a large quotient of bravado.Perhaps Larry Clark, who happened on the world of Kids when he started skateboarding and hanging out in the park, is part of a larger cultural development. An audience will simply not allow these children to be anything but innocent, whatever they say or do. We love such puppies, but we fear the creatures they will turn into, when their manly posing is more convincing and their sexuality un- deniable.

The effective part of Kids is the part that makes audiences think about their fears and not take refuge in them, as the main plot line demands.Harmony Korine has put a lot of things about adolescence into his screenplay that normally get left out. But what has he left out? Frustration and boredom - not drug-induced disorientation, but plain unmedicated boredom Crucially, too, bravado. On the two occasions when a teenage boy seems to be exaggerating - about sex with virgins, about the beating in the park - we realise he is telling the truth. Yet there is enough that is persuasive in the film to leave something behind.There's a long conversation at a party between four boys sitting squashed together on a sofa. They're about 10 years old, they have beautifully varied skin tones, they're smoking joints - it's like a Benetton ad even Benetton wouldn't run.

They say things like, "A person like me smokes till I 'lucinate, I don't know why." One boy, praised for the gold crucifix round his neck, preens adorably. But then he starts a fight in the park - with a black guy, though there's no racial agenda, since kids of all races join in beating him. This is the film's single most sensationalised scene, in the swiftness of its savagery and the alienating jauntiness of the music that accompanies it. The melodrama of confrontation - will she find him before he makes his next fatal conquest? - is averted at the last minute, but Clark has milked the prospect plentifully by then.Telly's friend Casper (Justin Pierce) at first seems like a more attractive figure. He gives money to an amputee on the subway, and gazes at Telly's mother breastfeeding as if she was an obscurely arousing nature programme on TV.