Even though I'm born in the eighties and was a teenager in the late nineties and early twenty-first century I can relate to this movie. Why? Because youth is still youth. Every decade has it's rebellion. In every decade there are kids who live like the kids in this movie. The fifties had the rockers, the sixties the mods and hippies, the seventies punk, the eighties metal and goth, nineties grunge and now we have the emos. There will always be youth rebellion.
And there will always be drugs, alcohol and those who fall for the fast living and become prisoners of their addiction.
What strikes me the most about this movie is the pessimism of the young people. They come from broken homes full of abuse. Physical abuse and substance abuse. And they don't expect to do any better themselves. They live for the day not thinking too much about the future. They party and do drugs to not have to think about what their lives are really like. They are true escapists but in the end reality catches up with them as we see in the sequels.
This is a sad movie showing the despair of lost young people hiding behind happy facades of constant partying. Even though it was made forty years ago it's still a very important documentary. I know people like this. Change the scenery to that of Stockholm today and the clothes to clothes of today and this movie could have been shot in 2008.
The question I ask myself after watching this movie is how can we make things right for people like this? I don't know and apparently people back then didn't know either because things are still the same.
