The Bad Kids movie review & film summary (2016)

Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe’s “The Bad Kids” belongs to the second type, but seems to imagine that it’s the first. Why it might think that is because it’s one of those films that emerges from what might be called the Gates Foundation/Sundance Institute/George Soros/Ford Foundation complex, which often gives us docs that due to their prestigious institutional backing and “socially conscious” themes sometimes make it into certain big festivals (i.e., Sundance) and even movie theaters.

Because some people automatically equate a liberal-humanistic outlook and social concerns with artistic worth, a film like “The Bad Kids” can gain a theatrical release. But it’s not a film for most general theatrical audiences, even those specifically interested in documentaries. It’s for people interested in its main concern: education.

The film is mischievously titled. The kids at its center are not at all bad, as we immediately see. Eleventh and twelfth graders who attend the Black Rock Continuation High School, an alternative school in a poor corner of California’s Mojave Desert, they are considered “at risk” due to various factors that might keep them from earning high school diplomas: troubled homes, criminal activity, drug habits, or just bad attitudes. The school attempts to overcome these obstacles by letting the students design their own curricula and proceed at their own paces, while also offering them various forms of support, counseling and extracurricular help.

The filmmakers spend several months in the school, focusing on a few students and its very committed and skillful female principal. Joey, a scrawny disaffected blond boy, we first see when a truancy officer visits his home and asks what he wants out of life. His inchoate response only hints at troubles that begin with his mom’s drug addiction. He has a habit too, but is also a talented guitar player and songwriter: not a really bad kid by a long shot.

As “The Bad Kids” follows him over the months, Joey comes and goes, vis a vis what’s asked of him at Black Rock. One day we see him give another student a brief description of the difference between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, adding that his favorite philosopher is Voltaire. No dummy he, obviously. But other times he doesn’t show up at school and has to admit, when he does return, that he’s been using.

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