Whatever else Harmony Korine does with his life and career – it was eight years between his second and third features – he will be remembered for giving vivid expression to the amoral, promiscuous, drug-addled, battered-and-bruised-and-thoroughly-confused generation of teenagers who came of age in the early 1990s.

Korine was only 18 when he met photographer Larry Clark and sold him the screenplay for Kids (1995), a shocking vérité-style portrait of teen torpor and turmoil, with an HIV-injected gangbang for a finale. Korine and Clark fell out, but not before Clark had bought another script in a similar vein, Ken Park, eventually filmed in 2002.

The son of a documentary filmmaker, Korine had cinema in his blood. So he claimed anyway – in interviews he’s a fabulist and mythomaniac. But the passion is there for all to see, and somehow Korine persuaded producer Cary Woods to back Gummo (1997), a provocative free-form portrait of a blighted Midwestern suburb peopled predominantly by teen misfits, retards and runaways. Some critics condemned it as a freak show, but Korine evidently feels at home here (in fact most of it was shot in the outskirts of Nashville, where he grew up). Perceptive viewers found echoes of John Cassavetes, Alan Clarke and Werner Herzog: hard truths and tough love. Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) had a narrower focus – a severely dysfunctional family including pater familias Werner Herzog, Chloë Sevigny, and Ewen Bremner as the eponymous schizophrenic son – but featured a similar mixture of improvisation, “real people” and actors. It was shot on dozens of mini digital cameras, and followed the diktats of Dogme 95’s Vows of Chastity.

Then, silence. Korine took a lot of drugs, dabbled in art videos and photography (he even has an absurdist novel to his name), and finally re-emerged in 2003 with Above The Below, a modest documentary of his friend David Blaine starving himself above the River Thames. It says something that he’s almost as well known for an unseen and incomplete film – the legendary Fight Harm, a candid-camera project in which Korine picks and loses fights with a string of bystanders – as for the movies he’s actually pulled off. Yet there’s something heartening about his refusal to play the Hollywood game, and there remains the persistent hope that he’ll pull something special out of the hat and surprise us all.

As to that third feature, Mister Lonely premiered well at Cannes 2007 (out of competition). The film earned an extremely mixed reception, as might be expected for a project featuring Hispanic star Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator who is invited to a Scottish commune by Marilyn Monroe-lookalike Samantha Morton. In another story strand, Werner Herzog plays a priest who accidentally drops a nun out of the cargo doors of a plane along with more conventional aid packages.

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