Seductive ‘Desert’ Takes a Charming Slap at Reality

Like “Peanuts” with hormones, the shipwrecked slackers of “Desert Blue” are a universe unto themselves. There are genuine adults in the general vicinity, but their influence is as marginal as everything else in a town where the main attractions are a 60-foot ice cream cone and an unfinished water park waiting for the water.

The follow-up to his 1997 festival favorite, “Hurricane Streets,” “Blue” marks a leap forward for director Morgan J. Freeman. He may not have had much of a budget, but he has a terrific young cast and an apparent gift for letting them relax and do their best work.

Brendan Sexton III, who played the pre-pubescent would-be rapist in “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” is a convincing lost boy as Blue, whose father’s death has left him at loose ends; Christina Ricci has seldom been better than she is as Ely, who breaks up the boredom of Baxter, Calif., (alleged population: 89) by blowing things up with mail-order explosives. Casey Affleck has the easy role as wise guy Pete, but both Isidra Vega (“Hurricane”) and Ethan Suplee (the hulking neo-Nazi of “American History X”) are very genuine, real without being cloying, and this in a story that sneers at reality every chance it gets.

What’s so seductive about “Desert Blue” is just how casually and economically Freeman: (a) establishes his back story and his characters and (b) passes off the most absurdist elements of his plot without our even noticing we’re being had.

His convergence of events is a miracle of suspended disbelief: At the moment that haughty sitcom actress Skye (the estimable Kate Hudson) is pulling through town with her father, Lance (John Heard)--a professor of cultural studies and roadside attractions who specifically wants to see the ice cream cone--a truck carrying the secret ingredient for the villainous Empire Cola (which stole the water from Baxter’s water park) crashes outside of town. When the driver unexpectedly dies, the spill becomes a possible environmental disaster and everyone in town is quarantined.

What Alfred Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin, the ultimately inconsequential thing that jump-starts a story, runs fairly amok in “Desert Blue,” which has as many MacGuffins as Baxter has people. Would Skye even be with her father, starlet that she is? Probably not, but we buy it anyway. Would Empire Cola need to receive or send a truckload of Secret Ingredient when its major plant is right there in Baxter? Unlikely. Who cares?

And would the closing off of the town really matter to anyone, when no one’s ever felt the need to leave before? Nah. But then, Freeman isn’t making one of those blockbuster sci-fi movies where everything is supposed to make sense. Instead, he’s really depicting a kind of teenage terrarium in which his well-defined kids are bored (as they are everywhere) and looking for love (ditto) and struggling to adjust (you get the point).

Unlike “Notting Hill’s” faux celebrity romance, you can believe the Skye-Blue match (that no one in Baxter has cable, of course, diminishes Skye’s wattage a bit) as well as the eventual bonding that takes place between her and the other kids, because Freeman has written it with real humans in mind.

It’s a small story, perhaps even an ephemeral movie, but “Desert Blue” also has a novelistic capacity for character and setting, without either the maudlin sentimentality or gratuitous vulgarity of most teen-oriented movies. It’s got heart, in other words, although if you called it a fairy tale, it would probably be embarrassed.

* MPAA rating: R for strong language and some teen alcohol abuse. Times guidelines: lots of casual drug and alcohol use.

‘Desert Blue’

Brendan Sexton III: Blue

Kate Hudson: Skye

John Heard: Lance

Christina Ricci: Ely

Casey Affleck: Pete

Sara Gilbert: Sandy

Samuel Goldwyn Films presents an Ignite Entertainment production. Directed and written by Morgan J. Freeman. Produced by Andrea Sperling, Nadia Leonelli and Michael Burns. Executive producers Leanna Creel, Marc Butan, Kip Hagopian. Director of photography Enrique Chediak. Edited by Sabine Hoffman. Music by Vytas Nagisetty. Production designer David Doernberg.

At selected theaters.