Living in a block of apartment buildings in New Belgrade's neighbourhood of Paviljoni, both kids are extremely juvenile; Pinki is a bit more thoughtful and articulate while Švaba is moody, impulsive, and prone to anger outbursts.

The duo also has another friend in the neighbourhood—Dijabola, an eager, geeky, and bespectacled outsider whose sexy and aloof single mother Lidija is a well-known television personality, hosting her own highly rated interview program while his Slovenian father is absent from his life.

Entering their early teens, Pinki, Švaba and Dijabola begin their fascination with a neighbour across the street nicknamed Kure who drives a nice car, makes regular robbing excursions to Germany while dating a trashy kafana singer.

Like many of their peers, Pinki and Švaba enter the world of crime at fourteen years of age in an ex-communist community that is in hyper-transition, which, because of war and sanctions, reminds the two friends of a theater of the absurd.

The idols of the main characters are famous Belgrade gangsters featured on a TV show called Puls Asfalta (Pulse of the Asphalt), which turns them into media stars.

[3][4] Receiving backing from one of Hollywood's most prominent talent agencies along with having a successful film on his hands, would lead to the young director spending most of the late summer and early fall 1996 in advanced talks about continuing his career in the United States.

In the end, after going through multiple Hollywood meetings during which he reportedly got offered scripts that he found "execrable",[3] Dragojević decided not to move to America, choosing instead to do the smaller of the two films in Serbia.

The story is built around a real-life occurrence depicted in a 1994 episode of Tragač, television series hosted and produced by Predrag Jeremić (1962-2022)[5] that aired on RTV Studio B, about Mirko "Beša" Bešević and Marko "Kameni" Pejković—two criminally-involved Belgrade adolescents who started out as friends before viciously turning on one another.

[4] He furthermore claims to have purposely avoided watching the actual TV report because he didn't want to have his writing, casting, and directorial decisions subconsciously influenced by images or language in it.

As the number of candidates was narrowed down to ten, they were enrolled in Mika Aleksić [sr]'s acting studio for specific two-month training that included going over the entire script scene-by-scene before the final duo—seventeen-year-old Pekić and sixteen-year-old Marić—were selected.

As Rane was going into theatrical release, the film's director, Srđan Dragojević, put out an accompanying statement explaining his personal motivation to revisit the subject of Yugoslav Wars, this time from the perspective of those living behind the frontlines.

And being the film's producer, I figured it would be good to see through private channels if there would be more serious repercussions so I managed to get to a man who held high post in the police at the time.

Looking back on his acting career, in February 2012, Bjelogrlić brought up the role of Čika Kure as being one of the dearest to him, but also revealed a later personal realization that he "could've done a much better job portraying it".

[21] Amy Taubin of The Village Voice finds Rane's pace to be erratic and frequently frantic, seeing its final scene as having "a relentless, demented logic of its own" while noting "there's nothing gratuitous about the violence of Dragojević's cinematic language".

She further remarks that the movie's imagery is "a bit too invested in martyrdom" representing "a politicized and catholicized version of live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse" before she detects "a touch of Holden Caulfield in Pinki's voiceover narration", while noting "the film plays like a cross between Los Olvidados and Dead Presidents".

[9] The New York Times' Janet Maslin brings up Emir Kusturica's Underground as having "demonstrated the anguish in the Balkans may be better conveyed through raucous, stinging satire than by more conventionally compassionate means" and notes that Dragojević employed the same tonal approach, which "helped him define a new generation of thugs who arouse both horror and pity".

Club sees Rane as being "modeled in many respects after GoodFellas" while "Dragojević's decision to let lost youth tell its own story reinforces the power of his forceful narrative and visual style, as Pinki's nihilistic musings reveal a character for whom hope has never been an option".