The Delinquents

Lola (Minogue, winsome and wimpy) and American Brownie (Schlatter, presumably cast because he looks like a young Mel Gibson) share so very, very much: they both love books, rock'n'roll and lolling around in their underwear, and are both entirely lacking in charisma or acting ability. Small wonder, then, that the adults, who are all bastards, just don't understand; small wonder, too, that when this small-town Australian Romeo and Juliet decide to make a go of it alone in the big city, they find it bloody hard. After all, Lola and Brownie are not very bright, even allowing that it is 1957. For one thing, despite forever professing their romantic spirit of adventure, all they really want to do is chuck away their lives by producing a brat at the age of 15; for another, they shack up with a couple of squatters, one of whom is a brainless, Pythonish parody of a DH Lawrence Yorkshireman. Retards flock together, apparently. The acting is universally atrocious, the direction flat and tedious, and the script, which cuts a dash through every cliché in the book, risible.