Screenwriter Harmony Korine (who gained fame for the screenplay of the controversial 1995 look at nihilistic urban youth, Kids) makes his directorial debut with this relentlessly downbeat, experimental look at the residents of an impoverished Midwestern small town. During the '70s, tornadoes destroyed much of Xenia, Ohio and though 20 years have passed, the town has yet to recover. From Korine's viewpoint, it is a gritty, run-down place populated by strange, uneducated, alienated and ugly people. Though the story is primarily a series of random scenes, verite-like interviews and snapshots, a consistent group of characters helps create a loose story. The main characters are Bunny Boy, a preteen youth who wanders about wearing a large pair of bunny ears and baggy shorts, who is first seen on a freeway overpass smoking a cigarette and then urinating on passing cars below, and two teen boys who ride around town on battered bikes, tormenting and killing stray cats to sell via a middle man to the local Chinese restaurant. The boys use their earnings to purchase glue for sniffing and for having sex with the retarded sister of a friend. Other characters include a pair of sexy, peroxide blonde sisters whose kitty mysteriously disappears, a retarded woman who wanders through town babbling and clutching a Cabbage Patch doll, a group of drunken slobs who destroy their kitchen during a night of stupid revelry, a black dwarf, an awkward homosexual, an albino woman, a comatose grandmother, and a pair of weight-lifting skinhead brothers.