E-Mail This Article to a Friend THIRTEEN

This raw and gritty film isn’t another girls-gone-wild movie but an unsensational depiction of modern junior-high-school girls growing up way too fast and the harried adults who fail to parent them. It’s directed in down-and-dirty, in-your-face video style by Catherine Hardwicke, an accomplished production designer who wrote the script with teenager Nikki Reed. Reed herself delivers a knockout performance as teen queen Evie, a vision of media-soaked sexuality in low-slung jeans and multiple piercings. She’s the "hot" girl in seventh grade, the envy of bookish girls like Tracy (the terrific Evan Rachel Wood) who see themselves as geeks desperate for the cool social status that Evie and her clique represent. Overnight, it seems, Tracy changes from good girl and budding poet into a shoplifting, glue-sniffing hellion under the spell of the manipulative, screwed-up Evie. And as Tracy turns sullen and unreachable, Holly Hunter grabs hold of the film with her lacerating portrayal of a well-meaning parent who’s lost control of her child. Hunter’s Melanie, a hip, hardworking single mother battling her own demons, hits not one false note. (100 minutes)