TV REVIEWS : ‘Love’ a Moving Tale of a Runaway Surviving on Streets

Male hustlers in Hollywood: The theme may sound like typical talk-show sleaze, but “The Price of Love,” a sensitive, deeply moving film about a desperate 16-year-old runaway, isn’t typical.

Writer Ronald Parker, director David Burton Morris and a standout cast of young actors avoid exploitation in this fictionalized account of the reality faced by countless young people trying to survive on mean urban streets.

Peter Facinelli plays Bret, an achingly innocent teen-ager who seeks escape from an abusive, unloving home and ends up squatting in a derelict building with a “family” of other young runaways until they’re rousted by the police. Unable to find a job, Bret is taken in by a good-hearted male prostitute named Beau (poignantly played by Jay Ferguson) and eventually starts hustling himself.

Although a couple of sympathetic police officers try to intervene, Bret’s confusion and hurt keep him from making the most of the limited options he’s given, after his father and stepmother refuse to help. After more degradation on the streets, the death of someone who did offer him genuine affection is a catalyst for change.

Facinelli, able to convey heart-rending eloquence without a word, gives a notably layered performance as a wounded, average kid without a clue. In their roles as empathetic hustlers, Ferguson and Steven Martini do the same. Some others of note are Laurel Holloman as a veteran runaway and Ben Gould as a vulnerable young new kid in town.

Nothing is overstated in this honest film, shot with a documentarian’s eye for the desperate and defeated on grimy Hollywood streets, and with compassion for the thousands of throwaway kids who are there because of abuse and neglect.

* “The Price of Love” airs at 8 tonight on Fox (Channel 11).