Bully

An account of a murder in Florida in 1993. Marty and Bobby have been friends since childhood. But the relationship is not equal: Bobby has beaten and humiliated him for years and does the same to everyone around him. Nobody stops it; the families do not see it, the school takes no interest, and the young people are left among themselves. Then a group of them makes a decision: they will kill him. The plan is entirely amateur; nobody knows what they are doing and seven people are involved. The hard thing is that the film manufactures no motive. The narrative shows the teenagers' daily life at length: a hot, empty suburb, drugs, video games, sex and complete aimlessness. The murder comes out of that emptiness. The source is the journalist Jim Schutze's book. Larry Clark directed; the cast is very young and mostly not professional. Brad Renfro plays Marty and Nick Stahl plays Bobby. It was shot handheld in natural light, close to documentary. An important example for anyone who can watch hard drama drawn from record. Before you watch, know this: the film shows sex and violence extremely explicitly, the ages of the cast became a subject of argument, and the narrative produces sympathy for no one.