Teenagers in seishun eiga (youth movies) tend to be pure-hearted types meant to inspire sighs of nostalgia from older audiences. But anyone who looks back at those years honestly will recall attitudes and actions not so naive — and some not so easy to forgive.
The enduring popularity of Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film "The Outsiders," and the S.E. Hinton novel it was based on, has something to do with sensational subject matter (specifically, gang fights and violent death), but the true draw is a cast of teen characters who aren't treated as "innocents."
The same uncompromising approach is present in the writing of "River's Edge," a teen drama by Isao Yukisada that's based on Kyoko Okazaki's 1993-94 manga series of the same name. Though Yukisada's film is set in the same time period as Okazaki's manga, a nostalgic glow is nowhere to be found.