The fantastic Mr. Franco, wearing grillz and long cornrows, rolls up with guns and a white Camaro convertible with red rims. His character, a rapper from “St. Pete” called Alien, is a hustler, dealer and self-anointed gangsta. He walks the bad-boy walk and talks the talk, but he’s strictly thug lite, a white caricature in a cartoonish masquerade of black masculinity. For the women he becomes something of a sleazy Prince Charming — not all the princesses are equally charmed — in a story that has metamorphosed into a feverish fairy tale. “Look at all my” stuff, he boasts, almost self-amazed, in a startling, deliriously funny riff on “The Great Gatsby” — except that instead of throwing shirts in the air he’s brandishing machine guns, bricks of dope, wads of cash, animal-print shorts.

Alien’s masquerade as well as his feud with a black gangster bring the film back to an earlier scene that indicates Mr. Korine has more on his mind than surface shocks. Brit and Candy are sitting in a class in which a professor is murmuring words like Reconstruction, war and African-Americans. One of them draws a heart and the words “I want penis” on some paper. They laugh and, as the professor keeps talking, one pantomimes giving oral sex. It doesn’t matter that they’re not paying attention to their history lesson. Because, at that point, they haven’t yet pretended to be gangstas and robbed the restaurant, giggling as they held a squirt gun to a black man’s head — playing thugs without the burden, without the history, without the cost.

Mr. Korine originally shows the robbery from the exterior and through the restaurant’s windows so that the assault, the women’s movements and violence, are seen inside a frame as if you were watching a film within a film. The whole episode looks preposterous, like a bad music video, and the women in their black ski masks just seem silly. Much later, when Mr. Korine loops back to the crime, he takes you inside so you can see the terrified customers cowering as Brit and Candy smash up the place, waving their “weapons.” The squirt guns are fakes, but both the women’s pleasure and the rage that pumps through the scene and increasingly through the film — feeding the excesses, the posturing and escalating violence like a poisoned river — feel eerily real, familiar and very American.

At once blunt and oblique, “Spring Breakers” looks different depending on how you hold it up to the light. From one angle it comes across as a savage social commentary that skitters from one idea to another — white faces, black masks, celebrity, the American dream, the limits of self-interest, the search for an authentic self — without stitching those ideas together. From another it comes off as the apotheosis of the excesses it so spectacularly displays. That Mr. Korine appears to be having it both (or many) ways may seem like a cop-out, but only if you believe that the role of the artist is to be a didact or a scold. Mr. Korine, on the other hand, embraces the role of court jester, the fool whose transgressive laughter carries corrosive truth. He laughs, you howl.

“Spring Breakers” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence and enough naked breasts to supply material for a second Seth MacFarlane song.