Skrillex music blares as thousands of screaming bros and half-naked co-eds line a sunbathed Florida beach, bouncing and gyrating in booze-drenched ecstasy in the slow-motion opening montage of “Spring Breakers.”

This wildly stereotypical raging isn’t the film’s focus though. It’s the loaded backdrop to a darker, maddeningly abstract story of four depraved and misguided girls and the seedy underworld into which they stumble.

“Spring Breakers” is anything but a carefree, teen party movie.

Cult director Harmony Korine’s break into the mainstream is one long, flashy music video, stringing along its liquid narrative with a booming pop soundtrack and slang-infused poetic flow. Korine casts Disney princesses and tween icons as his leads, then proceeds to corrupt them in a trance-like den of vice and sin.

The campy cultural satire stars Selena Gomez (“Wizards of Waverly Place”), Vanessa Hudgens (“High School Musical”), Ashley Benson (“Pretty Little Liars”) and Rachel Korine (the director’s young wife). None are particularly good actresses, but they don’t really have to be in these roles. The film’s second half is carried by the creepily transfixing performance of James Franco.

Franco plays a tattooed, cornrowed Southern rapper and drug dealer named Alien with gold-grilled teeth, and he absolutely kills it. His brilliantly unsettling performance alone makes “Spring Breakers” a must-see.

Still, the movie’s broad storyline is more than a bit implausible. Good Christian-girl Faith (Gomez) and her three free-spirited friends, Candy (Hudgens), Brit (Benson) and Cotty (Korine) are stuck at college, short on cash for Spring Break.

So naturally, three of them opt to throw on masks and rob a fast-food restaurant with water guns. Problem solved. Florida, here they come.

The first third of the movie is a straight-up rave. The girls drink, smoke, snort, swim and party the days away in nothing but bikinis, riding matching scooters and belting “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears.

It’s pure shock value set to Skrillex, Nelly, The Black Keys and Nicki Minaj. A revolving door of bare chests and bad decisions overdubbed with Faith’s naïve narration about the meaning of life and “finding themselves.”

The girls get arrested, and after a night in the drunk tank, they’re bailed out by a grinning Alien (Franco).

Then, the real movie begins.

Gomez has the deepest role of the four, carrying the first half before handing the film off to Franco. In one of the best scenes, Franco futilely tries to calm a frantic, panicking Gomez as she breaks down in a dingy pool hall surrounded by Alien’s gangster friends.

The rest of “Spring Breakers” is something entirely different, a neon-lit beachfront noir channeling “Scarface” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as the three remaining girls morph into Alien’s lawless muses — robbing, shooting and screwing in warped criminal bliss.

Coming off of a terribly miscast fiasco in “Oz the Great and Powerful,” Franco’s redneck, hood-rat drug lord fits squarely back in his weird method-acting comfort zone. Franco is right where he belongs: standing on an extravagant bed surrounded by guns, knives, cash and drugs with three feisty bombshells splayed out in front of him, yelling Alien’s materialistic mantra, “Look at my s**t!”

Franco’s performance alone warrants an entire review: the rhyming cadences and Ebonics clichés spurted out in a Southern drawl, the inexplicable aura of warmth and sincerity under his “gangsta” theatricality, even the eerie way he repeats the rager’s motto in deceitful whispers, “Spriiiiinnnng Breaakkkkkkk…”

Franco and his defiled tween stars are the main attraction, but Harmony Korine’s strangely hypnotic filmmaking gives “Spring Breakers” resonance.

What exactly Korine is trying to say is a conceptual mystery, but his overpowering medley of fervent montages, elegantly artful shots and jarring sounds grant the film a puzzling ambience of dreamlike romanticism and hyper-reality.

“Spring Breakers” is a confusing, morally ambiguous mess, but nevertheless an outrageously fascinating experience. It jumps between shocking social commentary and pulpy violence, from Franco in a steamy threesome to a guy smoking a bong made from a hollowed-out baby doll.

It’s impossible to think of Spring Break the same way ever again.

Published on March 27, 2013 at 10:42 pm

Contact Rob: rjmarvin@syr.edu