Feelings like these are what John Waters' "Cry-Baby" is about. The movie takes place in 1954, in Baltimore, at the dawn of rock 'n' roll (one is reminded of the opening scenes of "2001," at the dawn of man, an event less remarked at the time). The teenage culture is divided into three camps: the drapes, the squares, and the nerds. The drapes slick their hair into ducktails and wear black leather jackets and are proud to be juvenile delinquents. The squares wear crew cuts and want to go to college. The nerds are not made much of in "Cry-Baby," but in my memory they were the kids who wore slide rules in their pockets and collected science fiction magazines and grew up, one suspects, to be John Waters.

The movie tells the story of Cry-Baby himself, played by teen idol Johnny Depp as a juvenile delinquent who forever has a tear sliding halfway down his cheek, a reminder of a grief he will live with forever, a teenage tragedy that has left its mark on his soul, a lost romance. Into his life comes Allison (Amy Locane), the good girl who has a crush on Cry-Baby and feels strange stirrings in her loins by the promise that he is as bad as they say. The movie's bad guy is the good guy, Baldwin (Stephen Mailer), who loves Allison in the right way, which is to say he loves her so boringly he might as well not love her at all.

The movie's large cast (large enough to accommodate Polly Bergen and Traci Lords, David Nelson and Iggy Pop) includes Cry-Baby's grandparents (Pop and Susan Tyrrell), a rockabilly family that lives on the wrong side of the tracks and musicians who seem to be on the edge of inventing rock 'n' roll, if some one does not invent it for them. It also includes various parents, schoolmates, local tramps and sluts, and the straight-arrow types without which the 1950s would have lost their point of reference.

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