- Ken Park is about several Californian skateboarders' lives and relationships with and without their parents.
- Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim. But they spend precious little time together and none of them seems to know much about one another's family lives. This bizarre dichotomy underscores their alienation, the result of suburban ennui, a teenager's inherent sense of melodrama, and the disturbing nature of their home environments.—Bubba
- In a California city, skateboarders Shawn, Claude, Tate, and Peaches are friends of suicidal teenager Ken Park. Shawn has intercourse with his girlfriend and her mother. Claude has an abusive, violent, alcoholic father and a neglectful, passive pregnant mother. Tate is addicted to masturbation and hates his grandparents--who raise him--because he has no privacy in his own room. Peaches practices kinky sex and has a fanatical religious father who misses his wife.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- In the opening scene, teenager Ken Park (Adam Chubbuck) is seen skateboarding across Visalia. He arrives at a skate park, where he casually sits in the middle of it, sets up a camcorder, and shoots himself in the head with a handgun. His death is used to set up the rest of the film, which follows the lives of four other teens he used to hang out with, shortly after the suicide.
Shawn (James Bullard) is the most stable of the four main characters. He has an ongoing sexual relationship with his girlfriend (Zara Mcdowell)'s mother, Rhonda (Maeve Quinlan), throughout the story. He casually socializes with their family, who (including his girlfriend) are completely unaware of the situation and they never find out about him and Rhonda.
Claude (Stephen Jasso) is a troubled teen who fends off physical and emotional abuse from his alcoholic father while trying to take care of his very pregnant mother, who never does anything to defend him (mostly because she is used to the abuse that Claude's father inflicts upon her and Claude). Claude's father detests him for being insufficiently manly, but after coming home drunk one night, he attempts to perform oral sex on him, causing Claude to run away from home.
Peaches (Tiffany Limos) is a girl living alone with her extremely religious father (Julio Oscar Mechoso), who fixates on her as the embodiment of her deceased mother. When her father catches her and her boyfriend, Curtis, (Mike Apaletegui) on her bed about to have sex, he beats the boy and savagely disciplines her, including forcing her to participate in a quasi-incestuous wedding ritual with him.
Tate (James Ransone) is an unstable and sadistic adolescent living with his grandparents, whom he resents and frequently verbally abuses. He is shown engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation during masturbation. He eventually murders his grandparents in their bed, in retaliation for his grandfather (Harrison Young) "cheating" at Scrabble and his grandmother (Patricia Place) for "invading his privacy"; the act arouses him sexually.
The film cuts frequently between subplots, with no overlap of characters or events until the end. As Tate is being arrested, Shawn, Claude, and Peaches meet and have sex as a threesome. The ending finally reveals the motive behind Ken Park's suicide: he had impregnated his girlfriend (Loranne Maze), who responded to his suggestion of abortion by asking if he regretted his mother for not aborting him. Concluding that he did, he skates off to kill himself.
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