In today’s culture, where endless virtue signaling and the perpetual outrage machine of social media co-exist alongside authentically distressing news stories, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between considered, sincere disapproval or agitation and performative offense. But in 1995, Larry Clark’s Kids, starring a blend of unknown and non-professional actors, provoked genuine scandalous reactions.

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, this gritty snapshot of skateboarding young teens from Washington Square, and the hormonal mania, drugs, and alcohol powering their (very bad and sometimes criminal) decision-making, landed like an updated, adrenalized version of Reefer Madness. Scripted yet shot in a quasi-documentary style, it was everything parents feared about the corrupting impact and influence of adult vices, and youth behavior, when they weren’t around.

Its frank and unsettling depiction of directionless adolescence punched out of the entertainment news all the way through to myriad op-ed pieces, and when the Motion Picture Association of America slapped Kids with a NC-17 rating, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, whose Miramax had enjoyed an infusion of cash from its purchase by the Walt Disney Company only two years earlier, bought the film back in order to theatrically release it in its unaltered form.

The result was a financial and zeitgeist success. Kids would gross over $20 million in theaters, launched the careers of Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny, set up debut director Clark and young screenwriter Harmony Korine as indie provocateurs, and even catapult songwriter Lou Barlow into the mainstream, on the strength of the slinky menace of The Folk Implosion single “Natural One.”

The new documentary The Kids, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, grapples with the exploitation of some of the trauma and fractured home lives of so many who appeared in Kids, and the consequences of a briefly cracked-open window of opportunity and lack of a proper support system for its young stars. Despite its incredible specificity, and the fact that it basically acts as a cinematic eulogy for Justin Pierce (who committed suicide in 2000 at 25) and Harold Hunter (who died of a cocaine overdose in 2006 at 31), The Kids functions best as a generalized portrait of subcultural appropriation and the resentment it breeds, plus a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of attention and all manner of excess on still-developing brains.

Director Eddie Martin, whose work includes All This Mayhem, knows the ins-and-outs of the tight-knit skateboarding culture which serves as part of the bedrock foundation of both projects. And his generous laissez-faire approach, combined with a fantastic array of archival material, gives voice to many who could be called voiceless.

One question which emerges is just how much unvarnished “truth” (Clark’s stated aim, and certainly a big part of the movie’s marketing hook) The Kids was and is, versus a carefully, willfully, and pruriently curated portrait of teenage overindulgence. Hamilton Harris (a co-writer and producer on the movie, for whom this was a longtime passion project) and other interviewees involved in the production of The Kids share their memories, and none of them particularly cover Clark in glory. Some express anger over misrepresentation of their clique, and their own personality and behavior. Jon Abrahams talks about being pressured during a make-out sequence, as well as Clark’s coercive direction in a scene involving a costar’s nudity. Clark, who got to know many of the kids who would appear in his movie through his work as a photographer, when he would pay and bribe his subjects with marijuana, comes across somewhere between a deeply inappropriate, even older “Wooderson”-type and a more sociopathic manipulator.

The non-participation of Korine and Clark (unsurprising, given the film’s critical inquiry), as well as Sevigny, Dawson and other prominent onscreen performers like Leo Fitzpatrick, is a fulcrum of The Kids. To some viewers, that fact will itself simply confirm the movie’s prosecutorial undercurrent, and the sometimes concrete but other times vague accusations of exploitation made both by actors in The Kids but also parties who met Clark early on in casting sessions yet weren’t even involved in the film. To others, though, this single sidedness can legitimately be seen as a shortcoming which handicaps the effectiveness and probative value of The Kids. Some might even find it edges into the type of selective axe-grinding which runs especially rampant on social media.

What this split – and, indeed, the entire existence of Martin’s movie – speaks to, though, is that there are different truths for different parties. Clark’s The Kids could have been ultimately an enriching and elevating experience for a few, and a sapping and destructive one for others. Would similar tragedy still have found Pierce and Hunter if Clark or Korine never came into their lives? Would greater profit participation in The Kids have changed the lives of Pierce, Hunter, Harris and others, or would fame or increased public scrutiny felled more, or different, participants? More than 25 years ago, voices and cultures could often be coopted for entertainment or popular culture with few repercussions. Now, with more people justifiably demanding a stake in how those stories are told and sold, even viewers and consumers must grapple with the ethical obligations of artists and the companies for which they work.