Kids these days

“Thirteen”

Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, Holly Hunter

Directed by…

“Thirteen”

Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, Holly Hunter

Directed by Catherine Hardwick

There’s a point in every teenager’s life when rebellion becomes the norm. There are varying degrees of it, ranging from not listening to your parents to changing your entire lifestyle. Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), in Catherine Hardwick’s “Thirteen,” falls into the latter category – and then some – of rebellion.

Tracy is a 13-year-old starting out at a new school. It’s quickly apparent to her that her style – bright clothes and shoes and socks with cartoon characters – isn’t going to win her any popularity contests, cool friends or looks from guys. That area of school life is dominated by Evie (Nikki Reed), another 13-year-old who wears the latest trends, has body piercings and attracts all the guys. Tracy decides quickly that she wants to be more Evie and less nerdy.

After Tracy steals a pocketbook full of cash to impress Evie, the two become inseparable, with Evie moving in with Tracy for a time. It wouldn’t be so bad if Tracy’s home wasn’t in shambles. Her single mother, Mel (Holly Hunter), is a recovering alcoholic trying to hold her family, relationship with her boyfriend and home together by working as a babysitter and beautician out of her house. Mel is also leery of the influence Evie is having on her daughter – she sees Tracy getting more wild and uncontrollable, taking up drugs and alcohol and starting to do a little more than experiment with sex, while wearing all the latest fashions despite having no money.

Making things worse is Tracy’s affinity for cutting – slashing her wrists, not to kill herself, but for the thrill of coming close to death. When things go bad, she heads to the bathroom to cut. When things go really bad, you wonder if she’ll do more than just thrill-seek.

“Thirteen” is a film that spirals the audience into a world of excess and self-destruction that is incredible, considering the fact that the characters in that spiral are 13 years old. There are points in the film where the situations and interactions between the characters becomes squirm-in-your-seat uncomfortably real. The last 20 minutes or so are the most intense, seeing Tracy go from one bad situation to another, worse one.

Nikki Reed, who also co-wrote the film, and Evan Rachel Wood really sell their characters. It would be very easy to watch the film and dismiss what’s onscreen as unreal fantasy thanks to the extremity of the situations – would anyone fathom, for instance, a couple of 13-year-old girls trying to have a three-way with a twenty-something neighbor? – but Wood and Reed make them believable and all too realistic.

Holly Hunter, though, upstages the young actors. It’s not because she has more experience or has won more awards. Instead, she takes her character, one that could easily have fallen by the wayside in a film about 13-year-old girls, and makes it unflinchingly real. The hurt and, at times, betrayal she feels because of her daughter aren’t contrived emotions with Hunter’s Mel. We might as well be watching Hunter play herself rather than a character, because she is so convincing.

But the most interesting thing about “Thirteen” is the way it shows how such excess and self-destruction spurred by a cruel society is represented in American film.

Up until this point, only characters in their twenties, or at times, in their late teens, have been seen struggling with society and its effects on them. Here, though, that exploration is taken to the new, disturbing and previously off-limits world of pre- and early-teen girls.

What is being said about American society at the onset of the 21st century if 13-year-olds are out there doing things many adults would consider too extreme? Why do people so young feel the need to act the way Tracy and Evie do in this film? And what is to be done about it? All are interesting questions posed by the film, but none are answered in any definitive way.

Still, it’s quite an accomplishment for such issues to be posed in a film, especially when you stop to consider this is a film written in part by a 15-year-old.

“Thirteen” opens in select theaters around Pittsburgh on Sept. 19. Check your local listings for locations and show times.