Harmony Korine is just 25, yet already he's been a film director, novelist and skateboard champ. His work is feted and slated in equal measure, earning him both prizes for its ground-breaking approach and notoriety for its amoral take on American youth. Sean O'Hagan meets a man some call the future of cinema.

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Harmony Korine is telling me how he cast the female lead for his new film, The Julian Chronicles, currently shooting on location in New York. "I was watching Hard Copy [a tabloid-style TV show], and I saw this vision: a beautiful, totally blind figure-skater whose dream was to be an Olympic Gold. Her performance had a strange beauty, all skewered and distorted, her legs getting tangled up. I mean, if I'd written that sort of thing, I'd have gotten so much flak for being gratuitous, but here it is for real, on TV. So, I searched her out. Took me three months, but I found her. The thing is," he adds ruefully, "I thought she was 14, but it turns out she's only ten, so I've had to cut out the anal intercourse scene between her and Ewen Bremner, who plays her hard-core schizophrenic teacher."

In the few hours since we met, in the bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel, Korine has regaled me, and other open-mouthed patrons, with a succession of similarly surreal anecdotes. I've heard, for instance, how he once had a sexual predilection for teenage amputees, and how, during an adolescent LSD trip, his two companions, both practising Jehovah's Witnesses, performed a mutual circumcision ceremony. It is difficult to do justice to Korine in print, not least because of his singular speaking voice - an enervated, slightly high-pitched, adolescent whine - that rises in pitch and volume when he grows animated, which is often. He is prone to strange, spasm-like gesticulations when emphasising a point, and has a tendency to order two drinks at once and gulp from each of them in turn.

None of the above traits endeared him to the wary-to-point-of-jittery bar staff, one of whom hovered around our table obviously convinced that we were about to do a runner at any minute. (I learn later that the hotel had only recently re-admitted Korine, following an incident last year when he overturned a table and chased a persistent German fan into the street, brandishing a broken beer bottle and shouting, "Leave me alone! I'm only a kid and I'm insane!")

By the time we repair to his nearby apartment, he is in full, unstoppable flow. A treatise on "the lost art of vaudeville", which began back in the hotel bar, continued in its wildly lateral way as we ambled half a block along Lexington, and seemed to have fizzled out in the elevator, is suddenly, inexplicably re-ignited when he reappears from his bedroom wearing a pair of implausibly tiny patent-leather tap-shoes. There follows an impromptu display of tap-dancing, Harmony Korine-style. Arms splayed, brow corrugated in concentration, he skids and clatters across the wooden floor like Groucho Marx on amphetamines, scrunching underfoot the unanswered faxes that litter the room. Then, just when I am convinced it can't get any weirder, on cue, the apartment intercom buzzes and a dislocated voice calls out his name from four floors below. "Oh shit," wails Korine, pacing the floor, scratching his newly-shorn head. "I can't let this guy in. What's he doin' here? He's just escaped from Bellevue prison."

By now, I am convinced that there are two often conflicting personas fighting for space in the young director's overcrowded, hyperactive head. The first is an eccentric intellectual, who can hold forth on the failure of French nouvelle vague cinema, quote whole chunks from Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, then segue into a spiel on "the essential cruelty of comedy", with particular reference to Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. This Harmony Korine will often make grandiose statements, such as, "At an early age, I became obsessed with the transcendentalist cinema of Ozu and Bresson, with the idea of poetic beauty as the one key truth of film-making." The other Harmony Korine is, if anything, even more complex: a postmodern street punk, obsessed by the more extreme detritus of American popular culture - tabloid TV, gangsta rap, deviant sex - and high on his own particular brand of male machismo. Legend has it that, when a Hollywood agent boasted, "I'll match any offer you've been made", Korine replied, "The last guy told me I could fuck his sister. Can you match that?"

The two personas often overlap in surreal fashion: one moment, he is dazzling me with his erudition, the next threatening to break my legs if I misquote him. Even more problematic, in terms of the interview contract, is his seeming inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to differentiate between fact and fiction, particularly when it comes to the details of his own life. "What you have to understand about Harmony," a mutual friend had told me, "is that he constantly blurs the lines between truth and fantasy. Most of the time, it's a smokescreen to keep you guessing, like the young Dylan, but, sometimes, he just gets carried away and doesn't seem to know he's doing it. The odd thing is, the stories that are the most unbelievable are often the ones that turn out to be true."

As far as I could ascertain, the only time Korine can be trusted to be utterly truthful is when he is talking about his work. In his apartment, where, intriguingly, a tacked-up copy of Bob Dylan's anti-novel, Tarantula, shares wall-space with a pre-pubescent Brooke Shields from Louis Malle's film, Pretty Baby, and a triptych of homoerotic photographs by Raymond Pettibone, he explains his still-embryonic assault on mainstream cinematic values thus: "I want to change people's expectations of what cinema can do every single time I make a film. Cinema, as Herzog says, is still a form in its infancy, like a baby where the first leg is sticking out of the uterus. It's like we're only just plopping out of the womb, and, already, our sensibilities are jaded almost beyond repair. In a sense, my whole approach is fuelled by anger at the mediocrity of American film, at the peddling of lies and falsity and formula, at the denigration of this century's most powerful art form."

Because of the iconoclasm, and often extreme nature, of his vision, this 25-year-old self-styled artist, photographer, novelist and reigning enfant terrible of US cinema has managed, in his short but incendiary career, to offend more people than he has enthralled. Chances are that, if you have heard of him at all, it was in relation to the controversy engendered by the two feature films that have borne his name: 1996's Kids, a Larry Clark film, the screenplay for which Korine had written when he was just 19, and 1997's Gummo, his startling directorial debut, released in the UK last year. Both have garnered as much condemnation as critical acclaim for their supposedly amoral vision of a dysfunctional teenage America. One influential critic, Janet Maslin of the New York Times, succumbed to the sort of moral panic that attends every generation's attempt to define itself in extremis - whether through music, fiction or film - calling Korine a "nihilist" and dubbing Gummo "the worst film of the year". ("She obviously hadn't seen Three Heads In A Duffel Bag," quipped a rival critic.)

Elsewhere, he has been hailed as a true original whose skewered vision of the US owes more, paradoxically, to the auteurist tradition of European cinema. Gummo landed the Critic's Prize at both the Venice and Rotterdam film festivals, and he has impressed an influential handful of his cinematic peers, most notably Gus Van Sant and the esteemed German director, Werner Herzog, who has called Korine "the future of American cinema". His next two feature films will be made under the aegis of Dogme 95, the Danish film-making collective formed by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, directors of Breaking The Waves and Festen, respectively. In the pages of style magazines such as Dazed & Confused and The Face, the young director has been virtually canonised, albeit against his will, as the voice of the post-slacker generation - "I'm just the voice of Harmony," he says wearily.

This month, critical opinion will, no doubt, be divided once more with the British publication of A Crackup At The Race Riots, Korine's first novel - though, in this instance, the term applies more as an adjective than a noun. For a start, the book eschews linear narrative in favour of an assortment of seemingly unrelated ideas, one-liners, suicide notes, borrowed quotes, lists and cod-aphorisms. An anti-novel, if you like, that wilfully defies literal meaning. Korine, who cites the designer Charles Eames's ethos of "the unified aesthetic" when describing his overall vision, sees himself as "a contemporary collage-ist", but the term "chancer" could just as easily apply in this instance.

One chapter, Rumors, simply lists 61 semi-scurrilous one-liners: Placido Domingo likes sherbet; Roberta Flack is scared of going to the dentist; Flavor Flav is a classically-trained pianist; Jerry Garcia tongue-kissed his older sister on her deathbed. Elsewhere, TS Eliot's last words - "I'm so unlucky the mirror I broke was a black cat" - sit side by side with the late Tupac Shakur's Ten Favourite Novels, which include works by Freud, Goethe and Schopenhauer. Except that Eliot never said any such thing, and Shakur's name has been substituted for that of one of Harmony's heroes, the German film director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Funny and infuriating by turns, the book, according to Korine, "does possess an underlying narrative of sorts, but it's more of a swervy, thin line than a story". Which is, perhaps, why Doubleday, its US publisher, tied itself in knots trying to market the book, describing it as "Slacker meets James Thurber" and, even more pointlessly, as "the ultimate postmodern video novel". In its fragmented and encoded way, the book may well reflect the culture that spawned it, though, as one US reviewer noted, "Korine seems too much inside his own head to speak for anyone outside it."

"In many ways, the term 'writer' or, indeed, 'film-maker' is too constraining for what Harmony does," says Walter Donahue, his publisher at Faber. "If anything, he's an artist in the truest, most all-embracing sense. In Gummo, there's both an instinctive vision at work and a rigorous, formal intelligence applied to the subject matter. He's young and still excited by the possibilities of film-making, and he's not burdened by the past, although he knows it inside out. He's free to invent a new language, which is what he's in the process of doing."

Thus far, that new language has found its most powerful expression on the screen rather than on the page. Korine didn't go to to film school, and his interest in film-making seems to have been engendered, at least in part, by his somewhat unorthodox upbringing. Though the book blurb claims that "Harmony was raised in the carnival", the truth is more prosaic. His father, an Iranian-Jewish émigré, seems to have travelled extensively around America, first as a hippy, then as a boutique owner. Korine Jr was born in Bolinas, California, and soon after the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended "a progressive school that catered to people who were a little out of the ordinary".

He describes his childhood as "solitary", and says he was "a very slow developer", claiming not to have hit puberty till he was 16. "My dad didn't really talk to me when I was growing up. If he was angry, he'd whop me with a bat or throw a shoe. The other side to that was, 'Let's go see a movie.' He preferred a form of communication where he didn't have to actually say anything."

When the family relocated to New York, the teenage Korine, now convinced of what he calls his "otherness", spent an inordinate amount of time alone in one of the city's then plentiful repertory cinemas, absorbing the work of the European and American avant-garde, including films by Cassavetes, Herzog, Godard and, most important in terms of his development, Fassbinder and Alan Clark. "I'd see a Fassbinder film, then go and get a book about him out of the library, and find out that he was into melodrama and Douglas Sirk. Then I'd go and seek out all of Sirk's work. That's how I figured out there was a continuum in cinema and directing that, hopefully, I'm part of today."

The sense of wonder he felt during those solitary evenings has stayed with him, and, to a degree, underpins his old-fashioned belief in cinema's enduring power to convey wonder and astonishment. In one of his more poetic moments, he tells me, "There is something mysterious, almost inexplicable, about the idea of strangers coming together to sit in the dark, in silence or in laughter, responding to a film-maker's work. It's a sensual and a cerebral experience, which is why video, nor any of this interactive crap, will never replace it. I knew from a very early age - from the moment I saw the poetry of Buster Keaton - that there is no other art form that compares to film."

His otherness notwithstanding, the by then 18-year-old Korine had managed to become a teenage skateboard phenomenon, complete with corporate sponsorship, when the photographer Larry Clark met him in New York's Washington Square Park. Korine showed Clark a short script he had written about a 13-year-old boy who is taken to a prostitute by his father as a coming-of-age present. A couple of years later, Clark - who was now so in thrall to teenage skate culture that, at 52, he was togged out in hip-hugging baggy pants and skateboarding himself - asked Korine to write a screenplay about his everyday life. The result was Kids, a film described by one reeling critic - Janet Maslin again - as "a wake-up call to America", and by others as an extended, and vacuous, essay in amoralism. The truth lies somewhere in between.

Three years on, Kids stands as an ambitious but strangely soulless attempt to capture the enervated and, yes, amoral, gestalt of a certain kind of adolescent American inner-city reality. It follows a group of New York kids around the city, dispassionately recording them as they take drugs, fight and screw - lovelessly, ruthlessly, aimlessly. Underlying the often disturbing imagery - everyone in the film looks under-age, yet their demeanour and dialogue suggests that, though barely into adolescence, they are hardened survivors - is a moral tale about unsafe sex and the spread of HIV.

It was the film's deadpan tone, detached point of view and provocative style more than its subject matter that seemed to upset many critics, who accused Clark - and, by proxy, Korine - of exploitation rather than documentation. In the US, Republican Bob Dole described it as "a nightmare of depravity", while here, Social Democrat MP, Emma Nicholson, called it "disgusting material that panders to paedophile fantasies".

Kids, as Korine is quick to point out, is essentially a Larry Clark film, and loaded with the latter's usual preoccupations-cum-obsessions - casual violence, drug-taking and warped adolescent sexuality. "For me, it was just a job for hire, y'know?" shrugs Korine, still an adolescent himself when he "banged out" the screenplay in just three weeks. He now seems less than interested in rekindling an old controversy. "I would have made a very different film from Larry's. In fact, I'd have made it more non-judgmental and detached. But there is a morality there. I was reading a lot of Greek tragedy at the time, and I was obsessed with the idea of the sins of the fathers, of everything coming round. It's just not the usual kind of black-and-white Hollywood moral tale, where good triumphs and everyone learns a life lesson. Where I grew up, those rules did not apply."

If Kids showed that Korine had an ear for dialogue, a natural aptitude for casting unknowns - the much-acclaimed Chloë Sevigny, his erstwhile girlfriend and ongoing muse, made her debut in the film before going on to star in Trees Lounge and The Last Days Of Disco) - and an ability to write from the inside about the more transgressive elements of US youth culture, his directorial debut in 1997, Gummo, was nothing short of a revelation. Arguably the most original film of the Nineties, it conjures up an at times nightmarish vision of a dysfunctional middle-America that, outside of the Sixties photography of Duane Michaels and, significantly, Larry Clark, had not been documented before. Blocked on bad drugs, in thrall to gangsta rap and death-metal, and drawn (through boredom rather than desire) to loveless sex, Korine's characters are the trailer-park, white-trash youth of middle America, whose dead-end lifestyle he records without judgment or idealisation.

Shot near Nashville, which doubles for Xenia, Ohio, a small town devastated by a tornado back in 1970, it opens with footage of the aftermath of the storm, including one unforgettable image of a dog impaled on a satellite antenna. "The metaphor of the tornado freed me up, and I began to think in terms of pure images and scenarios. Anything but plot. Plot disgusts me. Real life doesn't have plots." Using hand-held video and Super 8, as well as stop-action photography and Polaroids, Korine created an often wilfully jarring but utterly mesmerising montage of a society where, as he puts it, "none of the normal rules apply". Employing non-actors alongside relative unknowns, he manages to pull up short all our preconceived notions of film-making, merging various older genres - home movies, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, the German realist cinema of Fassbinder - into a new form that effortlessly transcends the sum of its parts. What is initially disturbing about Gummo is how the camera seems to be recording "real" people in unrehearsed situations: two skinhead brothers who, seemingly unable to converse, simply punch each other in turn in a ritual test of endurance; a retarded girl lovingly shaves her eyebrows in front of a mirror in order to "look more pretty".

"What I'm concerned with is the presentation of reality," says Korine. "I present my films as real and organic, while, simultaneously, I'm actually manipulating everything you see. Gummo might look in places like fly-on-the-wall documentary, but it was mapped out, scene by scene, though more as a montage than as a linear narrative. I want people to feel like the images fell out of the sky. Ultimately, I'm a trickster."

Gummo's narrative, what there is of it, follows two paint-sniffing protagonists as they eke out a living shooting cats to sell to a local butcher. Forrest Gump it is not. Perhaps because the film does not conform to any of the usual cinematic narrative genres - rites-of-passage, loss of innocence, redemption through action - or offer anything remotely resembling a moral subtext, it was difficult to finance. Harvey Weinstein, the influential head of Miramax, which had funded Kids, baulked at the idea of a youth-oriented film that included teenage prostitution, transvestism and cat killing. In the end, Cary Woods, a Hollywood heavyweight who had produced a string of successful genre pics, including Copland and Scream, raised private funding to make the film through Ted Turner's FineLine, which had previously courted controversy with David Cronenberg's Crash. Woods has since said that he will back any film Korine wants to make, so great is his belief in the young director's ability to "create a new kind of cinema".

"I still feel sore that Gummo was dismissed by mainstream American critics for all the wrong reasons," says Woods. "There was certainly a generational and moral misunderstanding of what Harmony was trying to do. I got the feeling that many metropolitan critics shared a moral-cum-political consensus: they either didn't believe that the America he portrayed existed, or, more likely, they didn't want it shown. That said, anyone with even the slightest grasp of cinematic artistry should have seen that we were dealing with a fresh, new talent here. I've produced 14 films and, to be honest, Harmony possesses the kind of ambition that could be dangerous in an artist with less talent. He sets out in each film to do something entirely new and visionary. Even when he doesn't pull it off, his boldness is breathtaking."

Yet, in pursuing his singular vision, Korine does, almost as part of his artistic raison d'être, court moral outrage. His employment of non-actors in Gummo, particularly the casting of a Down's Syndrome sufferer in the role of a retarded teenage prostitute, led to inevitable accusations of exploitation. "I think that notion is, of itself, ridiculous," says Korine. "For a start, it suggests that people with handicaps are too stupid to know what a movie is. Is it exploitation to use someone with an illness to play someone with an illness? Or is it exploitation to get Dustin Hoffman or Tom Hanks to fake it? I mean, you won't see any slobber on Tom Hanks's face, no blood or shit on his underpants. What you will see is the lovable Hollywood-style eccentric schizophrenic, all exaggerated ticks and twists. That's real exploitation. That's real ego."

In one scene, one of the central characters, Solomon (played by the strangely captivating Jacob Reynolds), bonds with the girl in a moment of non-sexual intimacy and, in the process, Korine turns a potentially gratuitous interlude into the film's most tender moment. "It would have been so easy to be sleazy," he grins, "but it's much more challenging to set that up and then go off in the opposite direction. People never credit me for that, because they're too busy complying with the ongoing Gumpification of cinema and of life. America simply isn't ready for realism. It wants the simple message spelled out in big letters. When I read the critics' line that there is no morality in my films, I think, 'Where do these people live?' Where I come from, people do not pay for their sins in an obvious way, and people do get away with doing bad stuff. Plus, morality is relative, anyway. What's bad to you and me might not be bad to a kid trapped in a violent family in a dead-end town. If your father beats up on your mother every night and you witness that from a very early age, you can get inured to the pain and suffering, and then start to think, 'This is how things are.' If that's how you're raised, what's the first thing you're gonna do when you get married at 18?"

Latent violence crackles like static through the film's disconnected narrative, but its most explosive moment occurs when an enraged redneck batters a steel-framed chair out of shape in a confined, and crowded, room. Though no one is hurt, the scene has a visceral power that jolts the viewer in a way that the choreographed violence of a Tarantino or Scorsese film no longer can.

"The main thing I learned in making Gummo was never to say, 'Cut!'" says Korine, giving some insight into his unorthodox methodology. "If you tell the actors what to do up to a point, then just keep shooting after the scene is supposedly finished, there's often a chemistry that occurs that can make a scene explode and burn. I love that. You see it all the time in Alan Clark's films; the notion that a scene could begin or end anywhere. His films are like life. They just go on. They don't really start and end like other films. He understood the randomness of life. That's where I want to go. The totally-scripted film is over as a format as far as I'm concerned. The screenplay format hasn't changed in essence since day one, and it's become an anachronism in many ways."

For his new film, The Julian Chronicles, he has dispensed with a screenplay altogether, in favour of an extended treatment; scenes are blocked out and briefly discussed with the actors, then shot with as much energy and chemistry as possible. Featuring Sevigny, again, Werner Herzog, Ewen Bremner and Chrissie Kobylak, the aforementioned blind figure-skater, it is the first Korine film to be made under the Dogme 95 manifesto, which insists that members adhere to ten creative tenets to ensure a new kind of honesty and purity in film-making - these include filming in natural light, shooting scenes only in chronological sequence and using hand-held cameras.

"I've signed the Dogme vow of chastity," says Korine, clearly proud to be directing the collective's first US film, "because it makes perfect sense to me. One of the things that's killing films - apart from the idiots who make them - is that it's an elitist medium. New digital video technology challenges all that. That's why the big studios hate it. Video is a new psychology as much as anything - it's cheap; you don't have to have a big, obtrusive and impersonal crew; and you have the freedom to shoot for as long as you like on as many cameras as you like. It's liberating - it takes the so-called mystery out of directing."

The onus, though, is on the actors. Bremner, best known for his role as Spud in Trainspotting, worked in a New York psychiatric rehabilitation centre for the criminally insane for six weeks in preparation for his role as a man going through the first stages of schizophrenia, a part based on Korine's uncle. "It's been a challenge all right," says Bremner, "mainly because, at Harmony's insistence, it's all coming together at the last minute. I mean, there's no scripted dialogue, just blocked-out scenes where we can improvise and get to the heart of the thing. You hardly know from day to day what's going to be shot or how. It's scary and exhilarating, and I'd probably be shitting myself if it wasn't a Harmony Korine movie."

I ask him if the volatile Korine is easy to work with. "Well, I guess some people mightn't think so. He's totally uninhibited and totally rigorous. Every scene is mapped out in his head. It took me a while to figure out how he can be so spontaneous and so disciplined, but I guess it's just down to self-belief and purity of vision. It's a rare gift, but he has it."

Korine is also engaged on a more protracted, and potentially problematic, Dogme project, entitled Fight: "The premise of the film is that I go up to the biggest men I can find and taunt them until they beat up on me. Basically, I have to say whatever it takes to make the guy throw the first punch. My cameraman, who's usually across the street, has got to keep filming unless it looks like I'm gonna die." Ignoring my look of disbelief, he grows more animated as he describes the fights that have already been recorded. "The one I had with two Arab taxi drivers was brutal, man. Then, there was the one with the bouncer at Stringfellows, who jumped on my legs and broke my ankle." He pulls down his sock to show an ugly protrusion where a bone has not set properly. "The video footage of that one is exceptional."

Wondering if, perhaps, this is one of his moments of slippage from fact into fantasy, I later ask his fellow film-maker and friend, Oran, if Fight is for real. "Oh, he told you about that, did he? Yeah, it's for real all right. I saw him after one fight and he was badly bashed up. He'd been to hospital for concussion, his ribs were cracked and his face was a mess. It's disturbing but, y'now, that's Harmony. He's a, how shall I put it, very complex guy."

Indeed. Thus far, it turns out, Korine has been beaten up four times and arrested twice for his art, but, to his dismay, he has only about 13 minutes of footage in the can for his troubles. "I kinda overlooked the fact that fights don't last very long, and how damaging it is when someone really beats you up. My hospital bills are soaring, plus I can't get arrested a third time or I'll go to jail." His intention, though, is to fight "every demographic in New York - Italians, Puerto Ricans... and I've got to find an aggressive Jew like myself. Jews don't like to fight, they just curse you out in Yiddish. I want to find a big, butch motorcycle dyke, too."

When I ask Korine to explain the reasoning behind this extreme, even by his standards, piece of cinematic performance art, he goes off on another wildly lateral monologue about "the essential cruelty of comedy", and how he wants "to make the funniest film ever made, like Buster Keaton makes a snuff movie". Perhaps sensing that I am genuinely disturbed by both his masochism and his sick sense of humour, he grows serious: "Look, I've always gotten in fights. It's because I'm a runt. I'm so little, I'd always get smashed. Then, I started to like fighting. I started to get off on being punched. I like the pain. I identify it with some kind of love. Ultimately, I think violence is really necessary. It's one of the ways I keep myself from not killing myself, because I have so much anger inside me."

And, there, perhaps, is the rub. Right now, Korine is the most intriguing prospect in US cinema because of the extremity of his artistic vision.

He is also a total refusenik, breaking virtually every formulaic rule of Hollywood film-making, story-telling and moralising. In the process, he is creating a new sense of the possibilities of cinema. Young and ambitious, he possess the self-belief, and arrogance, of his years - and, God knows, cinema needs his kind of iconoclasm now more than ever. He is, as the critic Kurt Andersen noted in the New Yorker, "a malcontent as young artists were once supposed to be malcontents - not in the disengaged, everything-sucks, nothing-matters fashion, but fired up with specific and impolitic impatience at mediocrity and wall-to-wall conformity".

And yet... and yet, there are some strange and disturbing demons lurking beneath his angry young punk exterior that neither film, nor indeed fiction-making of any kind, may be capable of containing or, indeed, exorcising. Korine is a contemporary enfant terrible in every sense of the term; a product of, and a reaction to, a culture where dysfunctionalism has come to be embraced as an aesthetic. Maybe the question is not can Harmony Korine save cinema's tarnished soul, but can cinema save his?

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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