Oshima's still-shocking portrait of reckless adolescence chronicles the doomed, desperate love of a high school couple determined at all costs to categorically reject the mediocrity and mendacity of adulthood. A lucid vision of a lurid and remarkably alive world of dangerous extremities, Cruel Story of Youth finds a pulsing beauty in the neon-lit underworld of irremediably corrupted youth captured by its extraordinary widescreen compositions. A landmark of postwar Japanese cinema, Oshima's second Shochiku film was a surprise box office hit that temporarily repaired his precarious standing with the studio and went on to become an icon of the taiyozoku, or "Sun Tribe," films, the popular cycle of overripe youth exploitation pictures that were an important staple of Japanese cinema during the early 1960s.