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While 26-year-old Singaporean filmmaker Royston Tan's debut feature invites an obvious comparison to Larry Clark's underdressed-teens-in-crisis movie KIDS (1995), the association does Tan a serious injustice. While both films describe the downward trajectory of a doomed generation, Clark's tone is that of a hectoring older man wagging his wizened finger and drooling over the nubile wreckage, but Tan connects with his dangerously disaffected youth in a way that only a truly sympathetic contemporary can. As Tan himself states in the opening epigraph, he set out to make a film about the lives of Singapore's out-of-control junior gangsters, but wound up reconnecting to a...