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For a while, Deborah Kampmeier’s Virgin seems that rare thing, a genuine depiction of real people in a real milieu, as teenage Jessie (an impressive Elizabeth Moss) wanders through her world, getting a cowboy hatted-creep to buy her a bottle of Jack Daniel, flirting unsuccessfully with Shane, the high-school dreamboat, at the diner where he works, and greeting the pre-dawn driving through the neighborhood on her paper route. Nothing seems false, all seems felt, a modest rebuke to phony films like Hilary Duff’s Raise Your Voice, until Jessie drinks too much at a party and wanders into the woods and she, and the movie, lose their integrity.

Kampmeier doesn’t so much investigate religious hysteria as she succumbs to it. Birds fly into Jessie’s bedroom announcing that she’s bearing God’s child — which annoys her fundamentalist father and goody-goody younger sis and brings another tear or two to the eyes of her long-suffering mom (Robin Wright Penn). Roberto Rossellini had a similar concept in his short "The Miracle," but the junior-high symbolism, the self-conscious stylistics (slow motion, extreme close-ups), and the humorless excesses (a picturesquely crazy Mexican woman bemoaning her lost child; townsfolk like extras from Deliverance) make this film seem more like Miracle Whip. (114 minutes)