The latest in Kids and Bully director Larry Clark’s voyeuristic forays into teenage alienation and sexual acting out, Wassup Rockers takes as its motley crew of protagonists a group of long-haired skateboarders from the South Central Los Angeles ghetto. As with all of Clark’s movies, there’s a verité immediacy to the proceedings. Unfortunately, unlike those two aforementioned in-your-face gems, there’s also a pandering and indistinctness that mark it as among the lesser of his works.

Wassup Rockers charts a skipped school day in the life of these “Latino Ramones” — black-clad, tight-pants-wearing punk aficionados who, constantly harassed for being different, fight to be themselves. Along with a few friends, the group takes a series of busses up to Beverly Hills to skateboard. There, hassled by the police,targeted by residents and seduced by two schoolgirls (Laura Cellner and Jessica Steinbaum) who spark as much to their ethnicity as their scruffiness, the boysmust navigate a surrealistic maze of mock-danger and try to return to the air-quote safety of their own impoverished burg.

Clark’s films typically have a roughhewn quality, but here he somewhat eschews the handheld nihilism of his earlier work for a few more staged and rooted shots. He still has his cinematic, fetishistic affection for skinny, shirtless teen boys and pouty, jailbait girls (in Clark’s world, everyone under 21 is a sexual magnet) and there’s his usual discerning eye for quick, shorthand detail — from the dirty crasher’s den that’s perfect in its name-brand-less anonymity to a scene where one character’s mother returns home in the morning with a wad of single dollar bills. The kids, too, are all right — they have a natural charm.

But something about Wassup Rockers feels reductive, perhaps because there’s so little individual insight into the characters. There’s no doubt legitimacy to the tension between the Latino “rockers” of the title and their neighborhood’s African-Americans,as well as the preppy teens they encounter in Beverly Hills, but things here feel paradoxically authentic and staged. The settings are grungily accurate — save for when we enter tonier territory — and the crew eventually achieves a sort of collective wounded grace and place in our memory (Clark is a superb caster, as the careers of Kids alums Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny attest), but Wassup Rockers is beset with clownish, wildly farcical elements that ring false.

We know the kids aren’t Mexican, as they constantly have to remind various folks they encounter, but they do come across as emblems of a cultural minority that Clark seems to want to flog and celebrate by merely contrasting with buffoonish subsets from other races. By the time Janice Dickinson, in a weird cameo, is electrocuted in a tub after attempting to seduce Kico, you’re left wondering exactly whose view of Los Angeles Wassup Rockers represents. (First Look, R, 110 mins.)