Beautiful Losers

I lasted just under an hour at this 80-minute film. My attention was already on the wane, when clips from the awful films of sometime festival darling Harmony Korine and commercial director/artist Mike Mills finished me off.

Beautiful Losers is a perfectly well-made film, a record of the lives and careers of a dozen or so artists who emerged from the punk/squatter/skateboard/graffiti scene on the Lower East Side in the 1990s. The artists are mostly interesting and articulate, or occasionally inarticulate in an interesting way. Their work is occasionally interesting too, though for the most part the paintings are not something I’d put on my wall. And that, ultimately, is the problem: if you don’t find the art compelling, you’re likely not going to find this film compelling either. Ultimately, it seems to me, Beautiful Losers is more a visual record of the artists and the community they came out of than a universal story of interest to a broader audience. It will play well at festivals, and find a welcoming home in art galleries. But with its vignette structure and no strong universal theme, it just didn’t hold my interest.