Yoshida’s debut feature vividly depicts the ennui and intellectual and spiritual restlessness of a generation of bourgeois youth in Tokyo at the dawn of the 1960s. Our protagonist is the Rimbaud-reading son of a prominent business executive; as he and his companions idle around, Yoshida visionarily renders their casual nihilism as an inevitable outcome of the sociocultural malaise resulting from Japan’s postwar reconstruction and subsequent economic boom. A work of formidable formal accomplishment and potent social critique, Good-for-Nothing announced Yoshida as one of Japanese cinema’s great young iconoclasts. Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.