Just a Bunch of Kids Who Kidnap and Kill
“Alpha Dog” is a true-crime story inspired by a pipsqueak thug improbably named Jesse James Hollywood, who once reigned over a modern Sodom and Gomorrah in — you know it — Los Angeles.

In 2000 Mr. Hollywood, a 20-year-old fledgling marijuana kingpin, allegedly ordered the murder of the 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, whose half brother owed $1,200 for a dope debt. Friends of this alpha dealer kidnapped the teenager while he was walking near his San Fernando Valley home. Initially constrained, the hostage was soon getting stoned, drinking and watching television with his captors, who even brought him along to a party. At some point, however, Mr. Hollywood awoke to the severity of the crime (he called his lawyer) and decided to get rid of Nicholas, who was shot multiple times and left to rot in a national forest with sweeping ocean views.

Mr. Hollywood then fled the country and spent years as one of the F.B.I.’s most wanted, before being captured in Brazil in 2005. By then the writer and director Nick Cassavetes was deep into “Alpha Dog,” his sexed-up, alternately funny and horrifying, heavy-panting exploitation of the crime, which, despite some name and geography changes, tracks close to the recorded facts.

Here the dimwitted mastermind is Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch), a pint-size nihilist with wary eyes and a face full of molting hair. He has a skinny blonde named Angela (Olivia Wilde), a pit bull called Adolf and a posse of cretins. He lives in a ranch house big enough for the Bradys and watches a lot of TV. Bruce Willis plays his dad.

Universal Pictures
Justin Timberlake, left, and Anton Yelchin in “Alpha Dog.”

The cretins rule in “Alpha Dog,” which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism. Voyeurism that Mr. Cassavetes, a filmmaker with a lurid imagination and a talent for coaxing full-throttle performances from his actors, rewards with an embarrassment of vulgarities: lusciously tanned flesh, sensuously quivering muscles, cascades of blond hair, acres of tattoos, a sylph in a schoolgirl miniskirt (“Dance, bitch!” someone cries), a three-way in a swimming pool, intimations of Nazism, a little tae kwon do and a lot of homegrown weed.

The kids are not all right. Which is, like, you know, the point. Maybe yes, maybe no, or maybe it’s just fun to watch a lot of attractive, talented young actors shimmy across the screen while embodying the collective parental nightmare. Do you know where your children are? In “Alpha Dog” they’re getting busy, chilling out, smoking blunts and chugging coolers faster than a toothless wino. They’re also baby-sitting a hostage named Zack (Anton Yelchin). They do the darnedest things, these children of the suburban damned: Johnny’s best friend, Frankie (Justin Timberlake), for one, does his chores and culls buds from his father’s pot plants while wearing low-slung shorts and no shirt, his snaky torso soaking up the rays and our gaze under the bright blue sky. Readmore click >>NyTimes