The movie follows a group of teachers at a Mojave Desert high school, one of California's alternative schools for students at risk of dropping out, as they take an unconventional approach to improve the lives of their struggling students.
Bolstered by a confident fly-on-the-wall aesthetic and a suitably somber score by Michael Jacaszek, Fulton and Pepe locate both heartbreak and hope in their intertwined tales of people fighting to gain control of their (and others') lives.
Determined teachers fight long odds in The Bad Kids, a slice-of-life documentary of the struggles in a high school for at-risk youth in California's Mojave Desert.
An affecting and enlightening documentary, The Bad Kids offers a fly-on-the-wall look at efforts to help students graduate high school despite their personal struggles and looming sense of hopelessness.
One of the major points The Bad Kids makes is that most "problem students" have common struggles that could be managed with the individualized attention that big public high schools can't provide.
