Martin Bell's Streetwise deals with a group of transients in Seattle. The main characters are young (between 14 and 16), so this film is a really powerful look into their young lives. However, that's really all this film feels like: a look. The shots are set up to make it look less like a documentary and more like a traditional narrative film. I found myself forgetting that the film was actually a documentary, but that fact is brought back to the foreground once one of the main characters commits suicide in prison. The narrative feel of the film is both a positive and a negative. While the characters are extraordinary enough to hold our attention without bringing up the societal causes behind their positions in life, the film kind of flows from person to person without much in the way of a real story. Rather, it's a brief look into the lives of Seattle's street rats. Dewayne's suicide serves as the end point for the film, but it feels like much more could have been done with this story. Instead of focusing on so many peripheral individuals, Bell might have been better served further developing the stories of the central protagonists of the film. The end of the film leaves you wanting to know more about them, but it doesn't offer closure. I suppose Bell's point could be that for these people, there is no closure, so this film shouldn't offer any either. And that's fair. It's definitely a solid point to make.
