"Gummo" (1997), Korine's directorial debut, abandoned linear storytelling to take an uncompromising look at alienated youth in Middle America. His contemporary Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn navigate their beat-up bikes around a Rust Belt suburban wasteland getting their kicks from sex and glue-sniffing. Set in a fictional, end-of-the-line Xenia, Ohio that has never recovered from the tornado of the early 1970s, "Gummo" veers from scripted performance to self-conscious improvisation to seemingly spontaneous filming of non-actors, sometimes within a single scene, and does not contain a single character who is not weird or deviant. The bizarre figures and grotesque episodes never coalesce to form a meaningful narrative, and the sum of its colorful parts do not add up to a whole movie. This self-styled missing Marx Brother needs more than just faith that a narrative will materialize, but his efforts so far, though immature, make Korine a talent to keep watching.