Or can you? Never mind, who cares, I was merely trying to tie a Bob Seger lyric into a review of a stunningly fulfilling documentary about the freaks, geeks, and outcasts that are currently molding and personifying the brands most of us grew up with.  Michael Jackson and Ray Charles have gracefully departed, leaving Pepsi to Geoff McFetridge. And he’s picked up the slack over at Nike for Bo Jackson and Andrew Agassi, throwing a retro spin and a new medium at the colors and the designs unironically hawked by these sports superstars in the mid-90s.

And it’s working for these companies, and arguably for the aspirations of underground and compensation-hungry artists around the world.

Once truly unheard of and unheralded skaters, punks, and taggers cavorting with heroin addicts, yesterday’s delinquents have become today’s leading creative directors and ad-agency execs.  They’ve created films like Kids, given street-cred to Urban Outfitters, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, and emblazoned history with the ubiquitous Obama “Hope” poster. And now you can take in the transformation/evolution/destruction-of-purity/ascent-to-legitimacy yourself with Aaron Rose’s Beautiful Losers. One part art exhibit, one part documentary, all parts fascinating….

Beautiful Losers film trailer from beautifullosersfilm on Vimeo.