It's a documentary of a bunch of street kids in Seattle. Rat is doing and selling drugs. He's friend with older Jack and living in an abandoned building. He'd take his gun to "roll a queer" and dumpster dive. Tiny is a 14 year old prostitute who won't consider abortions and lives in a dysfunctional family with her mom and stepfather. DeWayne is a panhanding and thieving hustler. He hangs himself in the end.

It's an amazing insightful documentary. It's praise worthy for director Martin Bell, his wife photographer Mary Ellen Mark and the Life Magazine article writer Cheryl McCall. They really got the trust from these kids and get right inside in their lives. It would be helpful if they include the kids' name in caption as well as their ages. Their ages are really shocking and it would have been more compelling to see it shown in bold block letters.

A motley group of scruffy homeless runaway kids do whatever it takes to eke out a meager existence on the mean streets of Seattle, Washington. Director Martin Bell presents a stark, sad, and poignant depiction of the various ways parents fail their own children through neglect, abuse, problems with alcoholism, and simply not being mature and selfless enough to have kids in the first place. Moreover, this documentary shows with unflinching honesty and candor the assorted ways these kids survive by panhandling, prostitution, selling drugs, selling blood, and diving in dumpsters for food. Although these kids struggle to be optimistic, there's nonetheless an underlying sense of melancholy and hopelessness that pervades throughout.

The teens featured herein are a colorful and memorable bunch: Clever and scrappy scrounger Rat, sweet and radiant underage hooker Erin "Tiny" Blackwell, brash Biker Kim, tough and protective tomboy lesbian Lou Ellen "Lulu" Couch, cute couple Munchkin and Patti, wannabe playboy Shadow, spunky Shellie, and braggart Patrice Pitts. Perhaps the most tragic kid in this doc is Dewayne Pomeroy, a goodhearted lost soul with a father in prison who ultimately winds up committing suicide. Most importantly, this documentary gains considerable emotional punch from the way it astutely observes these kids without ever passing moral judgement on them. An absolute powerhouse.

Martin Bell's "Streetwise" looks at children living on the streets of Seattle. I understand that his wife Mary Ellen Mark's goal was to show that, even in the city ranked the most livable in the US, there was still homelessness. Are there any major cities in the US that don't have homelessness?*

I'd say that the best thing about the documentary is that it humanizes these children, reminding us that street people aren't something to be feared. Everyone should see the documentary.

I noticed that Baby Gramps did a song in the documentary. He performed once in my middle school.

*By contrast, my parents didn't see any homeless people when they went to Japan.