Young people have always been characterized by being highly active and committed alternative viewpoints. Industrialization and urbanization made life more comfortable and freed up much time for young people, thus, spawning teenage culture in the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. This combination, coupled with severe social problems such as poverty, racialization, ageism, and homophobia, led to juvenile delinquency. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the portrayals of unruly youth from three movies and three scholarly articles to find out what exactly motivates their behavior. Unruly Youth and Adaptation Although Travis is already twenty-six years old in the film, he nonetheless represents later generations of young people. His disobedience to social norms is due to his moral changes during the Vietnam War and his long absence within the framework of a standard urban society ( Taxi Driver ). Costas describes similar reasons that contribute to social marginalization in his work, studying the formation of the favela population; however, he puts more emphasis on racialization (Costas 117). In the end, marginalization forces both the protagonist of the film and the residents of favelas to illegal activities, such as violence and participating in drug trafficking. The motivation for asocial behavior is both resistance and coping. The main driver of such a mental strategy of Travis and the favela residents is an unsuccessful attempt to adapt to social norms that were once natural (Costas 117). Failed social adaptation contributes to the increase of misunderstanding and, consequently, the conflict between urban communities, which results in an open clash, as in Taxi Driver , or in the avoidance of legal behaviors. Unruly Youth and Self-Expression The criminality of the youth in The Warriors movie, in turn, is a result of a breaking down of societal control and the anarchy which follows. The powerlessness and passivity of the police led to the formation of many aggressive gangs that fight for the zone of influence and simply express their cruel nature. Parenti studies a similar opinion of US police officers on the cultivation of juvenile delinquency, who explained this process through the prism of the broken windows theory (71). The absence of persons who can ensure the authority of the law and, thereby, support the well-being of the community leads to such Napoleonic goals as the capture of all of New York. Without a doubt, the reason for this rebellious behavior of young people is the desire for self-expression and self-satisfaction. It is confirmed by the motivation of Luther, the main antagonist of The Warriors , who says that he just likes to act brutal and cruel. Additional evidence of this assumption is also segregation through outward self-identification of members of gangs based on costumes and gender. Unruly Youth in Oppression La Haine offers probably the most realistic look at the sources of wayward youth, at least in France. The director emphasizes the whole range of social issues, such as police brutality, racial prejudice, lack of access to education, and poverty, which provoke violent protests among multicultural and multi-ethnic youth from the Paris ghet