Bloody kids and the wild child within

"They scream non-stop for the first two years so you get no sleep." "You turn into a zombie for lack of stimulating adult conversation." "You send them to a local school and they become crack dealers." "Then they hit puberty and refuse to talk to you for six years." "You're not allowed to throw them to the floor and pummel their heads in." "You have to spend all your money on them." "And they criticise you the whole time because you don't recycle or go on animal rights marches." "And because they can't get a job they live with you till they're 25, still messing their rooms and wanting their laundry done." "Then, when you get old and sick they refuse to look after you, and you have to blow your savings on an old folks' home."

Now there's another item to be added to the long list of reasons not to spawn. Your little darlings might turn out like the protagonists of Larry Clarke's film Kids. There's no way I'll be in any shape to deal with all that stuff in 15 years' time - why, I barely feel up to it now. Watching the antics of Clarke's heroes, Telly and Caspar, stimulates the dialogue between your sanctimonious inner parent and your wriggling inner child. "Disgusting," says the IP, watching a rosy, puppy-rounded girl having her training bra removed by a drooling youth with a speech impediment. "She should be at home reading Famous Five books, just like I was at that age!" The IC, meanwhile, feels a funny sense of deja vu.

The scriptwriter, Harmony Korine, is not, as the name so richly suggests, either a hippy-dippy New Age babe nor the heroine of a Broadway tapdance extravaganza, but a skateboard-yob in his early twenties, and his screenplay is heavy on the "Yo, bitch!" factor. But the real surprise is not how much, but how little teenage life has changed. Apart from the skateboards, the dude-speak, Aids and, well, the pills, and OK, the rap music (this is starting to sound like "What have the Romans ever done for us?") the hedonistic world of Kids is a strangely familiar one. As the camera noses into an out-of-control teen party, the wincing Inner Child remembers all too many nights of boorishness, drunkenness and sex games. One New Year's Eve party degenerated so quickly that within half an hour of arrival, I and two friends were locked inside the bathroom with a six-pack. Before immuring ourselves we had seen one lad powering up the stairs, taking a dainty china figure from each alcove and smashing them on the banister, and a youth crashing round the kitchen agitating his piggy little pink penis to roars of approval from his mates. "Luuukur me knob," he kept hiccuping to passing girls, making Caspar's party small-talk ("Shut up, you fat bitch!") seem as polished as Joe Orton. There were people pissing in the garden (that was probably our fault), boys were fighting, girls were weeping or joining in, blood and vomit were splashed everywhere, screams mingled with the crunch of records and ornaments and the piteous cries of the girl whose house it was.

And that was a relatively chaste night out. Epic group-gropes weren't uncommon. The morning after one party, the word went round that one girl, who'd been left sleeping (more likely comatose) on the sofa had been stripped and molested - possibly raped - by the host and his friends. Nobody condoned the boys' action; they were promptly designated "bastards", the half-admiring appellation for anyone whose behaviour broke accepted bounds, but their victim ("silly cow") was generally agreed to have got what was coming to her, having been spotted early in the evening standing on the table dancing and removing items of clothing. One summer, it was quite the fashion for roaming gangs of local youths to take giggling girls into half-built houses on the estate, hold them down and "torture" them. A friend of mine, at the age of about 14, collected Polaroid "come shots" of her various boyfriends. I always found it faintly disturbing to view home-made porn featuring one's friends.

The kids in Kids certainly have better dress sense than we did, and they seem more affluent. They shoplift, are creepily homophobic - no surprises there - but their penchant for violence is startling as they savagely beat a rival skateboarder in the park. So much for teen solidarity. But I well remember the epic pastings that were regularly handed out down our way, with every child for streets around wolfishly following the cry "Scrap! Scrap!" And to our intense pride, we'd had a real teenage serial killer at our school. Shortly after leaving sixth form a boy had embarked on a killing spree to such bloody effect that his murders were initially conflated with those of the Yorkshire Ripper.Though no one could remember him directly, he was part of our mythology (there was a vague sense that his crimes underlined our grievances) and his school-books were greatly treasured, removed from official circulation and handed round like Samizdat texts. I remember seeing one, annotated with convincingly loopy scribbles, saying if this and if that, "somebody's gonna get hurt". It may have been a fake.

The best way to alleviate fears that the younger generation is collectively going to hell in a handcart is to talk to them; they invariably impress with their maturity, eloquence and sanity. Now teenagers are limbering up to tell adults alternately that a) the film Kids is nothing like reality or b) the film Kids is a true, searing document of teen lives which if anything doesn't go far enough. That's the brilliant thing about kids; out of a mixture of deference, boredom, nervousness, pragmatism and sheer kindness, they will always tell adults just what they think they want to hear.