Like his adoptive patron Werner Herzog, Harmony Korine is concerned with how people behave when culture recedes. But where Herzog is obsessed by characters who test themselves and summon their strength to fight the wilderness and its elements, Korine is drawn to people who have simply been left behind. His heroes and heroines have been remaindered, along with a few other traces of Americana. Gummo takes place in a town devastated by a tornado. The isolationist commune of Mister Lonely is filled with celebrity impersonators of bygone Hollywood stars. Trash Humpers is what it sounds like. Always, everyone has abandoned you; your world is just the stuff they didn’t want.

Spring Breakers begins with four college students–Faith, Brit, Candy, and Cotty–stranded on campus after the wealthier students have gone off to party. The four girls do headstands in the hallway; count their money (not enough to get away); and mimic acts of fellatio with fake guns and other stand-in penises. Eventually, Brit, Candy, and Cotty decide to rob a fast-food restaurant. Faith abstains.

The style of Spring Breakers is dissociative. Speech and image drift away from each other and back again; voice-over narration floats over elliptical montage sequences. The scene of the robbery is shown twice; the first time the view is from outside the restaurant, as the getaway car circles the joint and pop music blares on the radio. The violence of the scene is apprehended by the audience at a remove, as it is by Faith, who’s uncomfortable hearing about the robbery, but game to use the money to go to Florida and party.

After the girls go broke and get arrested, they’re bailed out and taken up by Alien, a full-time hustler and part-time rapper played with expert camp histrionics by James Franco. “I’m not from this planet, y’all,” insists Alien as he beckons the girls into his car.

Faith doesn’t recognize Alien’s criminal underworld as continuous with the fun times the four girls set out to have in Florida. By this point in the movie, we’ve already witnessed Faith’s trepidation at first hearing of the initial robbery. And she’s already displayed a more intense discomfort when hearing of the crime a second time: In the middle of drinking and singing Britney Spears in a convenience store parking lot, Brit, Candy, and Cotty launch with giddy abandon into a more detailed version of how they robbed the fast-food joint. This time we hear the noises and threats and see the fear on the victims’ faces. Faith is shocked—she hadn’t spent much time imagining what got them to Florida.

After being taken aside and given a bizarre, sexually charged...