‘Lost Angels’ (R)

The Blackboard Jungle has become the Valley of the BMWs in Hugh Hudson's overwrought teen psychodrama "Lost Angels." Rich brats are taken to task in this shoulder-shrugger, a so-what tale of rebels without cause or effect.

Adam Horovitz, better known as rap song satirist King Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys, plays the misunderstood hero, Tim Doolan. His mother Felicia (Celia Weston) is honeymooning with her second husband when Tim, about 16, is placed in juvenile detention. When Felicia returns, she commits Tim to a private adolescent mental hospital -- the recent proliferation of which has inspired Hudson's cynical portrait.

Valley Acres Psychiatric Hospital is an uncaring parent's warehouse for problem adolescents where a bottom-line-minded staff of uncaring doctors baby-sit the scamps. The exception is Dr. Charles Loftis, a shambling scarecrow of a therapist played by Donald Sutherland, who virtually oozes concern. With his soothing voice and comfortably rumpled corduroy jacket, Dr. Loftis eventually gets through Tim's fortress of anger, profanity and pain. After several therapy sessions -- group, family and one-on-one -- the frustrated teen-ager shakily comes to terms with himself, which causes him to question his allegiance to his suburban gang, Dead at Birth (the acronym is BAD spelled backward).

There's also Tim's puppy love affair with a fellow troubled teen, Cheryl (Amy Locane), who makes saps of the shrinks (except Loftis) with an apple-polishing act a first-grader playing doctor could see through. Enchanted with this dreamy California blond, Tim plans to run away with her to Mexico to make a home of their own. Also at issue are his relationships with his family -- especially his spitting-mad father Richard (played at feverish pitch by Graham Beckel), and his bloodthirsty but chicken half-brother Andy (played at feverish pitch by Don Bloomfield). Young Horovitz is no James Dean. He's more like a disoriented sitcom star who made a wrong turn on the way to Desilu. He is nevertheless appealing as the discomfited patient in this holiday for psychobabblers.

The trouble with teens today seems to be the trouble with teens yesterday. Indeed, trouble with teens seems as perennial as it is unsolvable. Today's leather jackets are designer and the juvenile delinquents are rich white kids, Born to the American Dream (BAD spelled forward). They seem to think it's chic to take to the streets. Provoked by DAB, even Paco, a Latino gang leader, wonders, "Why are you doing this?" "It's something to do," shrugs a suburbanite roughhouser.

Curiously, Paco is seen as a substitute for Shane, a Solomonic leader who is forced to fight these privileged trouble seekers. The Latinos go to religious parades, the DABs deface their families' Warhols. As with those moral blanks in "River's Edge," their parents, too busy, too drunk or too stoned, ignore them. After generations of shopping, television and other trivial pursuits, nobody has a grip on reality anymore.

Cheryl's mother, for instance, is a dipsomaniac, who is passed out when Cheryl brings Tim home to get stoned, have sex and eat yogurt. In retaliation for Mom's ignoring her again, Cheryl drives her new sports car into the pool, which lands the two kids in Valley Acres for the cure.

Parental neglect seems a fairly simple-minded explanation for the antisocial behavior that eats away at life in these United States. Surely violent entertainment, a permissive, greed-driven society, the availability of drugs, had something to do with creating these superbrats. Lost angels, my foot. What do you expect from a society that idolizes Sean Penn?