In Jean Renoir‘s 1936 Popular Front comedy-drama The Crime of M. Lange, an unsavory publisher takes it on the lam and leaves his staff in the lurch. Unwilling to break up their camaraderie, the staff reconstitutes itself as a cooperative, publishing a grassroots pulp western series featuring the happy-go-lucky cowboy Arizona Jim.

In Beautiful Losers, Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard‘s energized documentary celebrates the do-it-yourself subculture of artists engulfed in skateboarding, graffiti, and punk who gravitated toward the Lower East Side Alleged Gallery (of which Rose was the curator) in the late ‘80s. Here a motley collection of geeks, oddballs, lunatics, and downtowners -- including Shepard Fairey, Margaret Kigallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, Stephen Powers, Geoff McFeteridge, Thomas Campbell, and Ed Templeton -- recreated the cooperative spirits of Renoir with unfettered innocence, a lack of pretentiousness, and childlike glee, slapping together their artworks like Chuck Jones characters in heat. As one artist remarks in the film, they were just a "bunch of dumb, bored kids. All you had to do was have heart." Or as Stephen Powers comments, "It‘s really bad. I love it!"

Rose charts the rise and rise of this collection of happy-go-lucky outsiders with Rose as their Captain Nemo, navigating their success through a series of exhibitions at his Alleged Gallery. With splintered talking-head documentation and an edgy score by Money Mark of The Beastie Boys, the fortunes of the gallery are documented, rising along with the artists from the flotsam-and-jetsam 1989 art parties, to the crazy success of the 1992 Minimal Tracks skateboard art show which was picked up by a LA gallery and led to the first critical interest in the group, to the landmark 1997 group show, The Independents, which was the last hurrah of innocent abandon for the DIY group. Here, articles in The New York Times and Artforum transfo