Spring Breakers

Well, here it is: the Star Wars of Harmony Korine movies. Spring Breakers is bigger and brighter and pricier than anything the underground writer-director has vomited up before. It takes place in some other galaxy (Florida), and it’s dominated by a forceful Alien (James Franco, playing a rapper and drug lord called Alien).

So much press has already been devoted to this grimy little thing’s child-stars-gone-wild casting that any assessment of its actual contents is almost beside the point. But for Korine, concept is content, and his ensemble here is, on those terms, a coup worth at least some of the hype: Selena Gomez (the Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place), Ashley Benson (ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars) and Vanessa Hudgens (Disney’s High School Musical series), all glued into bikinis and taking drugs and generally in dire need of Jiminy Cricket. (The director’s wife, Rachel Korine, a veteran of her husband’s last feature, Trash Humpers, fits easily alongside the other three leads.)

There’s no conscience guiding the bug that finds them, though. Alien, the latest conceptualization by the busy acting hyphenate Franco, lives by the sort of self-styled code known to any self-respecting metal-mouthed, cornrow-wearing junior Tony Montana. He’s jacked and well-armed, respected and street-seasoned but still tender enough to plink-plunk the occasional Britney Spears ballad on his terrace’s white grand piano — the perfect muse for four college girls who want to be “hard.”

Getting hard means robbing a diner, Greyhounding their way to the beach, and eventually embracing Alien, who bails them out of jail when they’re too slow to flee a property-destroying party. (Korine talked the owner of a condemned motel into letting his extras tear the place apart on camera.) It’s less a plot than it is a video game, one that throws up increasingly violent challenges as the players move through its levels — and one that progresses down, not up. Cinematographer Benoît Debie makes this plain enough with his brilliantly lighted, post-Nintendo palette — by far the most convincing element of Korine’s mania for junked-out pastiche, and a fair reason to study Spring Breakers — so it’s a disappointment to hear one of the girls say, early on, that the robbery is just a video game.

It’s mostly rigged. To the extent that Spring Breakers says anything, it remarks on the indestructibility of this country’s young white women, its former Disney princesses and budding marketplace decision makers. But Korine remains an anti-purpose auteur, and that’s just as well when he asks us to root for his white heroines to kill a bunch of black people. That’s not a spoiler — it’s a warning.