Like a hurricane

When Todd Solondz's film Welcome to the Dollhouse made an indie-circuit splash in 1996, Brendan Sexton III had an impact all his own. As Brandon, the relentless bully of the movie's "wiener dog" heroine, played by Heather Matarazzo, Sexton expertly showed how domination can act as a mask for desperation. Brandon eventually runs away from his suburban New Jersey existence, and when he does, the film's central core of sadness disappears with him. The performance left viewers hungering for more from the quiet, intense young actor.

In this month's Hurricane Streets, directed by Morgan J. Freeman, it's Matarazzo who provides support and Sexton who plays the lead. His character, Marcus, lives in New York City with his barkeep grandmother. When not at school, he and his gang of misfit teen pals chill in their bomb shelter clubhouse, talking trash and playing with guns. But when they emerge, it is to mount bicycles not Harleys, and to hang out on local playgrounds peddling sneakers not smack. Marcus spends most of the film floundering between youth and adulthood, an emotional no-man's-land that Sexton himself, a boyish-looking eighteen-year-old whose face registers the ambiguity of experience, skillfully inhabits.

Like iconic teen actors before him, Sexton as Marcus throbs with the desire to escape. He is not generically sullen or smart-assed; suspicious of adults, he resorts to long, thoughtful silences. It is nonetheless an eloquent performance, establishing Sexton as an actor who, with a break or two, could have quite a career. BRENDAN LEMON: One of the things that fascinates me about Hurricane Streets is the way your character and his friends sit around their clubhouse and decide what's cool. One of the guys, for example, looks at one of the other's accessories and says, "That's so, like, out of fashion." How do street kids like these become aware of what's fashionable?

BRENDAN SEXTON III: They're told what's cool. Like skinny women with tans are the thing now; but just after the Renaissance, pleasantly plump pale women were cool. Even then I bet kids had to decide what was in style and tell their friends, "Yo, Michelangelo, beepers aren't cool anymore. Keep them off the ceiling, man."

BL: What are your standards for cool?

BS: I think everyone can be cool in their own way if they just let themselves be. If they believe they're cool for themselves and not for other people, then they're cool. If they're like a middle-aged guy who's trying to wear a leather jacket and get a short haircut and a tattoo and an earring or two because he wants to seem young again, he's obviously got some insecurity about him. And that's not cool.

BL: What kinds of movies strike you as cool? You yourself seem to choose parts in the smaller ones.

BS: I can't stand most of the big Hollywood stuff. Have you ever seen the Chi-Chi's Salsa commercial? There are these guys in a boardroom: six on one side, six on the other, and one guy in front. And the one in front says, "Should we do another one like this?" And six people raise their hands. Then he asks, "Or should we do salsa?" And six other people raise their hands. Chi-Chi's was saying, "That's the way our competitors operate." I think that's the way things are decided in Hollywood. It's like, "Cyberspace? Or aliens?" Five years ago, there were thousands of virtual reality movies, and last year there was the natural-disaster bandwagon, or just the disaster bandwagon, period. You can see one of those movies and then you won't have to go see another Hollywood film for five years.

BL: But independent movies follow trends too. For example, the kids in Kids, and all the movies it spawned, seemed almost as fantastical as anything that Hollywood puts out.

BS: It was real, but they just blew it up. When you talk to someone my age about the behavior in Kids, it's like, "Yeah, OK, whatever." But it was such a fantastical thing for adults. It really shocked people, and I think that was the point.

BL: People in the future are going to think that in the 1990s all non-Hollywood movies were about kids taking drugs and having sex.

BS: Well, if you got all your information from movies, you would think that in the '70s all black people were pimps. That was blaxploitation; now it's kidsploitation. But the goal of a movie is, after all, to have it be seen. A year or two ago, all anyone could talk about was O.J. and the Unabomber - they should have done a buddy movie together.

BL: Don't you think the reason why parents are shocked to see movies of kids having sex and doing drugs is because it makes them realize that their fifteen-year-old has a life of his own, a destiny outside their control?

BS: It's hard for parents. I'm not a parent, but I can guess how my dad feels. He's very supportive of what I do. But I know there was a time when he was really scared. He still worries a lot.

BL: About what happens when you're hanging out?

BS: Yeah.

BL: Have you ever gotten into any serious shit?