Director Harmony Korine is familiar with being called an outsider. His films have ranged from eccentric to disturbing to brilliant, and his experimental leanings have put him perpetually in the corner of popular cinema. What's to be said of the scruffy kid from Bolinas whose notoriously drug addled and dirty t-shirt clad Letterman appearance only served as fuel to the fire of his bad reputation. Korine's outrageous tactics and disregard for popularity are what make him a fascinating and intriguing director and person.

Korine grew up in Nashville, admiring cinema and the works of Godard, Cassavetes and Buster Keaton and watching a documentary filmmaker father create. At age 18, Korine fled for New York City, where he met many other young creative people, like Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Marc Jacobs, Chloë Sevigny and of course, famous and controversial photographer, Larry Clark. Clark's notoriety stemmed from his most well known project Tulsa, which is a photo journal of teenage debauchery and heroin addiction.

Clark inspired Korine to write a screenplay, and the result was the 1995 movie Kids. Kids is a story about teenagers and the AIDS crisis of the 90s, but it also has a disturbing underlying theme of a generation of lost children, who feel as though they have nothing to lose. Kids was criticized for its high levels of profanity and sexuality, but it was lauded at the independent spirit awards, winning best screenplay. Along with gaining attention from the public, Kids was the beginning of the career of then young actresses, Sevigny and Rosario Dawson.

In 1997 Korine released his first solo movie, Gummo. Primarily a disturbing and shocking film about white trash residents of a hurricane rattled ghost town, Gummo is a lot like watching a freak show. While the town's people go about their grotesque and mundane day-to-day activities with fervour, one is left to wonder why they even bother. Perhaps Korine's intention was a commentary on people in general, no matter the locale. Gummo received mixed reviews, winning awards but lacking mass appeal and exposure. Still, the haunting imagery present in Gummo won Korine the respect of his fellow directors, Bernardo Bertolucci and Werner Herzog, who both praised the film.

Korine's next film Julien Donkey-Boy was a special task, signing a Dogme95 manifesto, a Danish avante garde filmmaking technique developed to test the limits of directors by creating a variety of constraints for example: not being allowed props, special lighting and so forth. His interpretation of Dogme95 for Julien Donkey-Boy was praised. Admired for its honesty in the depiction of a young man suffering with untreated schizophrenia, Julien Donkey-Boy helped establish Korine as a respected, though underground filmmaker.

Korine released Mister Lonely in 2007 with a budget of $8.2-million, his biggest yet, about an obsessive Michael Jackson impersonator who finds an idyllic world of others just like himself. The film debuted at Cannes, to, of course, mixed reviews. Korine's films have a way of polarizing an audience into a love hate relationship with his works. The element that has been present through all of Korine's works, no matter how dark, is an underlying humour. A joker always, perennially cool, Korine reigns king of the cult film underground.