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Memorable, crazy movie

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Martin Bell, a one time photojournalist, directs "Streetwise", an influential documentary which charters the lives of various kids and teenagers living rough on the streets of 1980s Seattle. The film watches as Seattle's poor play, steal, do drugs, starve, chat, discuss their fears, hopes and anxieties. The filmmakers do their best to refrain from commenting on what is shown on screen, but some of the film's moments are obviously staged, and one can see "Streetwise's" editors struggling to force some discernible "structure" or "narrative arc" upon their raw footage. The film doesn't delve into more sordid areas – violence, prostitution, exploitation and drug use are hinted at but never explicitly shown – perhaps because the film's subjects did not sufficiently trust Bell's documentary crew. Many subsequent "hard hitting" documentaries have superseded "Streetwise" in this respect."You are looking at something so horrific and yet what you're getting as a filmmaker is incredible," Bell would say of his footage in interviews, crystallising the ethical tug-of-war documentaries like this frequently exhibit. Still, lined up next to Larry Clark's work (his photo-albums "Tulsa", "Teenage Lust", and his later films revolving around teenagers), this is a fairly restrained, low-key picture."The ignorance of non professional actors is an advantage, not a handicap," Vittorio De Sica would write in "How I Direct My films". De Sica was one of the premiere names in early neo realism, a movement whose aim was to "reformulate an existing cinematic grammar in order to condemn the political or sociological play-script of post-war Italy". The movement aimed to shine a light on the under-classes, to find the spectacle within the drudgery of everyday life. The movement and its hybrids died off in the early 1970s, at which time documentary cinema took off. You might say works like "Streetwise", and many subsequent documentaries since, are all that remains of the neo-realist movement.Of course it's hard to watch "Streetwise" today and not think of Ronald Reagan. Reagan came to office in 1981 with a mandate to reduce federal spending. In reality he increased it through an escalating military budget, all the while slashing funds for domestic programs that assisted working class and impoverished Americans. Under his leadership the income gap between the rich and the poor widened staggeringly, wages for the average worker declined and the nation's homeownership rate fell. During Reagan's two terms in the White House, which were boon times for the rich, the poverty rate in cities grew. Meanwhile, he'd presided over the dramatic deregulation of the nation's savings and loan industry, which would lead to rampant commercial real estate speculation. The result was widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of institutions. This led to a taxpayer bailout that cost hundreds of billions of dollars.By the end of Reagan's first term in office, federal assistance to local governments was cut 60 percent. Reagan eliminated general revenue sharing to cities, slashed urban programmes, funding for public service jobs and job training, almost dismantled federally funded legal services for the poor, cut the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and reduced funds for public transit.By the end of Reagan's second term, federal aid was cut to almost nothing. This was devastating for urban schools, libraries, municipal hospitals, clinics, and public service departments. All the while he'd engage in a programme to stigmatise the poor. During his speeches, in which he proudly rolled back social welfare, Regan cooked up "welfare bogeymen", poor people who were "busy scamming and ripping off the government". The imagery of "welfare cheats" persists to this day, and would lay the groundwork for numerous subsequent welfare reform laws, all of which pander to class hate and pit the middle-classes against the poor.By the time Reagan left office, the number of homeless persons on America's streets had risen to over one and a half million, many veterans and children. Reagan would defend this on an episode of Good Morning America, resorting to a classic bit of blame-the-victim Social Darwinism, saying that "people who are sleeping on the grates...the homeless...they're homeless, you might say, by choice." 8/10 – Somewhat dated, though hugely influential on the genre. See "On The Streets" by Penny Woolcock, a similar documentary set in a contemporary city. Worth one viewing.

The filmmakers spending months with runaway teens on the streets of Seattle, to gain their trust and allow them to be filmed. There is something oddly 'stagy' about some of the behavior. The kids are clearly aware of the camera. Yet, as one writer pointed out, that's also part of the power of the film, since adolescence has so much posturing and acting out anyway. The film tries to stay un-judgemental and avoids commentating in obvious ways, sometimes at the expense of seeming disconnected or uncomfortable voyeuristic. Yet there are moments of tremendous power here, both in seeing these kids cling to what bits of joy they can find, and to each other, and in seeing the grim realities of both their street and home lives, in hard-to-believe detail. A variable film, but a special, important one.

...but all in all it is a fairly accurate portrayal of life on the Seattle streets at that time. Back then there were hundreds of kids living on the streets and the film mainly follows the most visible (The ones who were ALWAYS on first and pike). I was involved as a periphery player in that scene from 1978 until about 1984 when MDA and cocaine flooded the Seattle streets and destroyed what was left of the downtown runaway youth culture that flourished there. Most of my friends from that era are either dead, in prison or god only knows where. Several died of cocaine overdoses or aids. It was a sad, despairing chapter of my life but there were many, many good kids on those streets. It would be interesting to find out what happened to a lot of those people.

Streetwise is a documentary that follows several runaway youth in the 1980s living on the streets of Seattle. Most are no older than 16, but already have made careers for themselves as pimps and prostitutes, thieves and muggers, panhandlers and dumpster divers, and doing what they can to survive.In a 2006 edition of the New Yorker, a critic suggested that these kids are kind of led by a sense of street freedom, but as another viewer commented, it is likely that a lot of these people, even Rat, were probably miserable, despite the best attempts to hide it or convince themselves otherwise (This was made clear by Rat's opening remark about the things he hated about flying--"coming back to the f***in' earth.") Clearly, Dewayne was, as he committed suicide at the age of 16. The sad thing is that these were kids of children themselves. Not in the sense that they were born to teenagers (which may actually be the case), but that many of their parents had not yet matured beyond their own selfishness to care for these kids as they needed to be (Tiny's mother rationalized her daughter's prostitution as a "phase"). Some of the young girls, 14 and hooking, tell us about their abusive fathers and stepfathers that, despite miserable marriages, their mothers still stuck by them irregardless of the negative consequences to their own children. Rat tells about this too, where he was tired of being between his helpless, divorced parents feuding. Or just parents who seemed capable of having kids, but not raising them. And since no one cared for them as children (most of them, I'm not sure what the background was on the young black man who was pimping the girls, the one who's mother and probably grandmother later show up and ask him to come home), they took the streets and became, as Tiny's mother says, 14 going on 21. They were the city of the lost children.Some might criticize this movie as being unrealistic, and at least the things coming from Dewayne's dad when talking to his son sounds like something from a film, although the Sound Recordist for the film has assured in his own comments that this is not the case. That there was no script. It makes the events all the more heartbreaking. If the purpose of the film was to raise awareness of the life of young runaways, it makes it point and drives it home hard. It also drives home hard that the policies of Regeanomics (joked by Dewayne later in the film) were hurting those lowest on the income scales (and consequently, moving many into the street). And it makes me wonder what the numbers of runaways and street kids are these days. Washington, DC (where I live now) has a large homeless population relative to the size of the district, but I never see any young panhandlers or prostitutes and wonder, is the situation still the same? Are the institutions working more to get kids off the streets? What has become of the Streetwise now?