From the looks of Freeway, Bright -- who also wrote the screenplay -- never met a stereotype he didn't like, but he never met one he couldn't bust wide open, either. The movie's heroine, Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon), is every girl from the wrong side of the tracks you knew in high school. Her eyes, rimmed with dark liner the way the "cheap" girls used to do it, look tiny, harsh, and glittering. In the opening scene, she's sitting in a classroom squinting at the blackboard, sounding her way through the sentence "The cat drinks milk" with the patient encouragement of her teacher.

Vanessa sure looks sleazy, hard, and dumb -- but before you can even think of laughing at her, she's won you over. The way she fends off the advances of her strung-out, tattooed stepdad (Michael T. Weiss), shooing him away as if he were a gnat with a penis, clues you in that she's nobody's fool. She's so self-possessed that later, when a policewoman asks her, "Is there some sort of sexual activity going on between your stepfather and yourself?" the only way to respond is to laugh.

Freeway really heats up when Vanessa, dressed in a red leather jacket, sets off on her way up the West Coast to her grandmother's trailer park after her crack-addict hooker mom (played by Amanda Plummer) gets busted and a portly, well-meaning social worker comes by to tell her she'll have to go to a foster home. On the road she meets youth therapist Bob Wolverton (played with delectable sleaziness by Kiefer Sutherland). In his comfy corduroy jacket and wire-rimmed glasses, with his wry, crooked smile and jaunty psychobanter, he comes off as the perfect well-meaning liberal professional. Too bad he's also a serial killer. He buys Vanessa dinner and tries to get her to tell him her troubles; he really just wants to get off as she describes, in her slithery Texas drawl, her abuse at the hands of her stepfather. It's not long, though, before she realizes what he's up to -- that he thinks of her and "her kind" as "garbage people" and he's going to treat her that way. She asks him point-blank if he's the serial killer she's seen on TV, and he says he is. "You act like you're on a mission, but all you wanna do is get off in a sex-type way!" she says, so indignant and outraged that she can't even think about being afraid.

After he threatens her with a knife, she puts a bullet through his head with the gun her boyfriend (the utterly charming Bokeem Woodbine) gave her. (With her characteristic tough-girl politeness, she first asks him if he accepts Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal savior.) Miraculously, he survives to claim Vanessa robbed and shot him; she's arrested and placed in a women's detention center, but by the end -- a few dozen tasteless jokes and bloody wounds later -- justice is finally served.

Bright's humor manages to be both over-the-top and subtle, and he's got a fine ally in Reese Witherspoon, who gives one of the best performances of any actress last year. (Freeway was released in a few cities in 1996 -- among them San Francisco, where it became a cult hit.) With her kewpie-doll profile and her no-nonsense wit, Witherspoon keeps Vanessa from turning into a cartoon. What's funny about her is also what's sort of affecting: she's both willful and vulnerable, and keeping that combination in balance means she can't afford to take shit from anyone. She doesn't, and that's what makes her, and the movie, so exhilarating. With its candy-bright colors, Freeway may look like a cheap date -- but only until you remember that money can't buy class.