They ride their bikes, drink milkshakes and tell jokes. They kill stray cats to sell to a local restaurant supplier, and spend their meager profits on glue for a cheap and effective high. They are heavy-metal Holden Caulfields, funny and observant, with nothing but a lot of time on their hands. Gummo is set in present-day Xenia, Ohio, a small town that never recovered, economically or psychically, from a devastating tornado that struck some 20 years ago. Xenia is a place of grimy poverty and numbing boredom, of drunken parties and summer rainshowers, of casual cruelty and surreal beauty.
Life goes on as it has for years and years, but hobbled.
He cast the film almost entirely with non-actors, frequently improvising from the script. And he shot the film in real, untreated locations near Nashville, Tennessee, using a wide variety of filmmaking techniques to convey the emotional truth of his characters' lives. I felt that if I took scenes that were interesting, that felt like slices of life, and put them together, then Gummo would become a narrative. I've thought about the movie a lot, and it's a very difficult movie to describe. I think we're all waiting to see where Harmony's going to be in a couple of years.