MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.’ Moving in the Right Direction : Most films about black inner-city life have been so male-oriented that Leslie Harris’ debut film seems like a bulletin from the other side of the tracks.

Chantel (Ariyan Johnson) is 17 and all attitude. A homegirl who lives with her parents and two younger brothers in a Brooklyn high-rise, she flaunts her sass. She loves the idea that she can dis her teachers and still get the highest grades in her class. She’ll need them: Her dream is to go to med school.

Leslie Harris, 32, who wrote and directed “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.,” is one of very few black women making feature-length movies in this country. As ragged and uneven as her movie is--it’s her first feature--it does occasionally move into areas of experience that we haven’t seen on a screen before. The lives of black women, after all, haven’t exactly been mined in the movies.

What Harris is trying to do is give us a closer look at the kind of girl we might not ordinarily look at twice. Chantel is a child of the hip-hop generation, and the movie’s rap soundtrack is like her pulse-beat. Harris wants to celebrate her sizzle but she also wants to demonstrate how it can get her into trouble--teen-age pregnancy trouble.

This is the part of the film (citywide) that seems least original. Once Chantel discovers she’s pregnant by her smooth new boyfriend (Kevin Thigpen)--he has a Jeep and lives in a brownstone--the film (rated R for language and sexuality) becomes a bit too cautionary and heavy-handed. It wears its social conscience on its tattered sleeve. It tries to be “educational.”

Harris is at her best when she just lets her actors jangle together. As an actress, Ariyan Johnson is pretty much all attitude too, but she’s a real dynamo. The scenes with Chantel and her girlfriends trading folklore about birth control, or the ones where Chantel confounds her stolid suitor Gerard (Jerard Washington) at a dance, are both funny and original.

Most movies about black inner-city life have been so male-oriented that “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” seems like a bulletin from the other side of the tracks. It’s more of a harbinger of better things to come than a solid achievement in its own right, but it’s moving in a fresh, invigorating direction.

‘Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.’ Ariyan Johnson: Chantel Mitchell Ebony Jerido: Natete Kevin Thigpen: Tyrone Jerard Washington: Gerard

A Miramax release. Director Leslie Harris. Producer Leslie Harris. Screenplay by Leslie Harris. Cinematographer Richard Connors. Editor Jack Haigis. Costumes Bruce Brickus. Production design Mike Green. Set decorator Robin Chase. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language and sexuality).