By Sam Jemielity

Love it or hate it, indie-film bad-boy Larry Clark's work is unforgettable. He won critical acclaim and a cult following in the 1970s and 1980s with stark -- some say "pornographic" -- depictions of youth sex and drug addiction in his landmark photography books Tulsa and Teenage Lust. Clark tackled filmmaking with equal impact. His debut feature film, 1995's Kids, depicted a young Manhattan Casanova with HIV whose hobby is deflowering virgins, and closed with an infamous, horrific rape scene involving current Big Love star Chloe Sevigny. A sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, Kids was eventually dropped by U.S. distributor Miramax and released under a newly formed shingle Excalibur Films to placate Miramax's nervous parent company Disney. In Clark's 2001 film Bully, based on actual events, Nick Stahl portrays the titular teenage thug. The sadistic adolescent is repaid by girls he's raped and friends he's abused by being stabbed and beaten to death and dumped in a Florida swamp. Clark's largely unreleased 2002 movie Ken Park, derided by detractors as "skater porn," includes incest, autoerotic asphyxiation, suicide, a graphic threesome and a kid stabbing his grandfather for cheating at Scrabble. That film once again polarized the critics. One reviewer called Ken Park "the worst movie I've seen since, well, Bully."

Undaunted by haters, Clark is back with a new movie, Wassup Rockers. Perhaps the most shocking thing about it? It got an R-rating, which is akin to Quentin Tarantino doing a G-movie for Pixar. Not that Clark's new movie isn't equally obsessed with youth culture. Wassup Rockers just skews more mainstream, leaving the carnality and brutality largely to the imagination. Wassup Rockers centers on seven pubescent, fun-loving, skateboarding, South Central punk rockers, most of them Salvadoran, all playing themselves. In the first half of the movie, which takes place in the ghetto, the boys -- led by girl-magnet Jonathan and perpetually sexually frustrated Kico -- skateboard, chase girls, screw around and try to be kids amid a violent, racially charged, drug- and gang-infested environment. The second half of the film turns into a wild adventure, as the boys bus in to Beverly Hills and encounter racist cops, Hollywood weirdos, gun-toting movie stars and some sexy Hilton-esque daughters of the super-rich.

Wassup Rockers, with its heart and sense of humor, just might finally bring Larry Clark to mainstream audiences. Why is the new documentary-look movie so user-friendly? "These are good kids," Clark told Playboy.com. "I wanted you to get to know them." On a recent visit to Chicago, the director discussed his genre-mixing new film, walking the line between sex and pornography and how -- as a father himself -- he handles the classic "birds-and-the-bees" speech.