Spring fever

When he’s not playing the Wizard of Oz or sleepwalking through the Oscars telecast, actor James Franco does occasionally remind us that he can turn in a performance that sits at the very edge of — well, what it is to be James Franco.

He did it in 127 Hours. And such is his character in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, playing a corn-rowed gangsta who calls himself Alien and prowls around the spring break beach parties of Florida looking for luscious young ladies to join in his exploits.

With his southern drawl, silver bridgework and insectival sunglasses, Franco is the most riveting thing in Korine’s movie, which is odd considering he’s surrounded by bikini-clad women holding machine guns.

Spring Breakers is one of those movies that divide audiences. Some call it feminist — with its posse of gun-toting ladies played by Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine. Others say it’s sexist, mainly concerned with slow-motion shots of exposed breasts bouncing around a sunny Florida beach party. And they’re both right.

Korine’s film is all about surfaces and textures. It looks both sleek and grimy, capturing the allure of sun-drenched Florida, while setting his tale of outlaws and spring dreams gone bad in tacky motel rooms and fluorescent-bulb hallways. It starts out being about college girls trying to get away from their hometown — seeking a new view of life in the endless parties of spring break — but it quickly descends into the kind of moral squalor that someone like Paul Schrader once specialized in capturing. Candy (Hudgens), Faith (Gomez), Brittany (Benson) and Cotty (Korine) are trying to scrape together enough money to blow off campus when late March comes around. That’s the traditional time when American students head for the hedonistic excesses of beachfront parties. For many it’s Fort Lauderdale or Daytona Beach, places where partying is a way of life.

Korine takes an impressionistic approach, repeating and overlapping lines of dialogue as he treats us to endless permutations of the wet-and-wild Florida party scene. When he’s not washing his images through grainy post-production filters, he’s shooting in slo-mo to suggest an endless parade of drunkenness and abandon. It’s pretty much like watching MTV’s Spring Break, except with more explicit drug use, more bare breasts, and a hell of a lot more guns.

Korine’s heroines start out in the slightly naughty zone, gearing up for spring break by pooling their money — until they find they’re short of funds, and desperately hold up a restaurant using squirt guns. The flush of excitement from their heist incites more daring moves. While Bible student and sole brunette Faith (Gomez) starts to smell trouble, the other three — blondes, of course — learn how to use their feminine charms to get what they want.

This is where Spring Breakers is rather scary — depicting the flush of youth as a kind of open buffet, where anything, good or bad, is made available. Korine depicts it all a little voyeuristically, though you can’t say it’s glamorized.

The three blondes become very good at teasing guys, and they push the party thing as far as it will go until they’re arrested for possession of cocaine — a small enough amount so that they can be released if they pay bail and a fine. Too bad they’re broke.

Enter Franco’s Alien with bail money, and the movie spins off into a whole other twilight zone of weirdness. Faith — shaken by the arrest — takes a bus ride home after they’re bailed out, but the other three cast their lot with the snakily charismatic gangsta and his promises of wealth and happiness. In any other movie, Franco’s acting would seem like a caricature, a parody of a gangsta video, but set against the lurid nightmare that is Korine’s Florida, it seems plausible. “Spring break,” Alien keeps intoning in his stoned southern drawl. “Spring break fo-evah…” And you know that Korine’s film is an elegy for the opportunities promised by youth, quickly lost or snatched away by reality. Almost like a dumbed-down version of The Great Gatsby for the Girls Gone Wild set.

It’s a little hard to believe that young people can be both so worldly and so naïve at the same time, capable of robbing restaurants to get money, yet still doe-eyed when it comes to accepting slick promises from complete strangers with alarming dental work and corn-rows. Chalk it up to Franco’s eerie channeling of real-life Florida rapper Dangeruss, and a sly, boyish charm that masks a lot of inexperience in the gangsta business. He’s trying to take over the turf of Big Arch (Gucci Mane), a former homey who’s not pleased that Alien is freelancing by enlisting his newly bailed trio to pull off heists. A few more robberies leads to retribution from Big Arch, and it’s up to Alien’s dark and dangerous female posse to step up for him.

This is where Spring Breakers does offer a fantasy of female empowerment. These gals are not just down there as tourists; they really are ready to do anything for money. There’s a great scene where they gather around Alien’s poolside baby grand. Wearing ski masks and hoisting automatic weapons, they start singing Britney Spears’ Everytime, which is about losing innocence and seeking forgiveness (among other things). As the movie shifts from Girls Gone Wild to something straight out of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, it’s clear that Spring Breakers is more style than substance (much as Miami Vice was), but nonetheless it’s a perverted trip to the dark underbelly of American youth — no surprise, at all, coming from the guy who wrote Kids.