Three-Part Harmony

“Our Song,” which premiered in competition two years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, is the kind of film that falls through the cracks perhaps because it features African Americans and Latinos who are neither junkies nor gangbangers nor prostitutes nor stand-up comics (though the characters do engage in a little shoplifting, drug use and promiscuity).

And, unlike most indie films these days, it’s star-free--it even got lost at Sundance, where such things are not supposed to matter.

“It’s like we didn’t have Heather Graham in our movie, we didn’t have the victorious ending,” says the film’s director, Jim McKay (who is not to be confused with the well-known sports broadcaster). “I joked while we were making the film that we should put everyone in Victorian costumes and then we would get distributed.”

The film follows three not especially traffic-stopping teenage girls (played by Kerry Washington, Anna Simpson and Maria Hernandez) as they begin to drift away from each other before the beginning of their sophomore year in high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. One girl gets pregnant, another becomes a social climber and the third wants to move ahead academically.

Hardly the stuff of great drama, but last year New York Times critic A.O. Scott called “Our Song,” then on the festival circuit, one of the two best films he’d seen all year (the other being the Chinese film “Not One Less”). The film opens Friday in Los Angeles.

Part of “Our Song’s” appeal is that the paths the girls take, though specific to who they are and where they live, are relatable to anyone who has grown up and grown apart--in other words, to anyone who’s ever been a teenager. The film also has an engaging documentary quality. The scenes seem caught rather than created. Things happen off-screen, as if the filmmakers somehow didn’t have their cameras along when they occurred.

Originally McKay, who wrote the script, intended an almost plotless film about three girls who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel and one rises above the other two. But a narrative eventually insinuated itself. He spent a year and half becoming acquainted with the milieu, walking the streets of Brooklyn and riding its subway trains, and writing the script, then rewriting it when he became enamored of a neighborhood marching band, the Jackie Robinson Steppers, which now figures prominently in the story.

All of this research was necessary because, obviously, McKay is not a teenage girl, nor a minority (the film has virtually no nonminority characters). He’s a thirtysomething white guy. So what’s he doing making a film featuring African American and Latino teens?

“The easy answer is that there’s no one else out there doing it,” he says, bristling at the question. “I don’t think that because I’m a white guy I should not make it, because there will be zero films instead of one. Yeah, there’s a million different communities or characters that are not represented. Why did I choose these? I’m not completely sure. I wish people who asked that question in a critical way were getting worked up about Quentin Tarantino or someone who’s stepping out of their own place in what I perceive is a much more negative and thoughtless way.”

In a way, though, this question can be considered a compliment. “I was totally blown away by the realness of the story,” says Washington, who has also appeared in “Save the Last Dance” and “Lift” and is currently shooting Joel Schumacher’s “Black Sheep.” “So much so that when I walked into my callback and he was there, I couldn’t believe he was this white guy. And I remember trying to keep my cool about it. Inside I was like, ‘Oh my God, how in the world did he do this?”’

“I don’t think any white man ever wrote a film about black women like that,” says Simpson, who initially thought the film’s writer must be a woman or at least black.

Washington says they tweaked very little of what he’d written (some dated slang, like “dope,” was excised). The only things McKay feels he didn’t quite get right were the level of violence in the lives of these kids--there is almost none in the film, though apparently there was some swirling around the Crown Heights set, and the fact that they spend their summers indoors to stay out of trouble.

McKay, who is partners with R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe in a production company called C-Hundred Film Corp., is known in the New York indie world as a producer, cheerleader, political activist and reminder of the days when these films weren’t made with distribution in mind. His first feature was the highly regarded “Girls Town,” also about young women, which he financed by making music videos he hated and maxing out his credit card.

Hard as it was to get that film made, at least it had a semi name, Lily Taylor. “Our Song,” which cost $110,000 (plus another $300,000 for post-production), $25,000 of it his own money, has no names because McKay didn’t want the audience distracted by having recognizable actors in it. He also wanted the characters to look like the people the story was about.

“I really wanted to cast people with darker skin,” he says. “When you talk about the wealth of black actors who are out there, it definitely veers toward the light-skin part of the spectrum. I purposely tried to go against that in my casting. Isn’t that a good thing for all the young black and Latina girls who are bludgeoned to death every day with Brandy and Christina Aguilera and all of these anorexic bottle-blond visions of perfection?”

“It’s not that Jim doesn’t want the women in his films to be beautiful,” adds Washington. “But he has a complete understanding of what beauty really is, and he sees beauty in realness.”

McKay had a hard time finding young women who looked “real” because such women are not encouraged to act. He thinks he failed, in the sense that the leads are arguably more attractive than the typical teen.

He told Washington and Martinez not to diet or otherwise try to improve their appearance. Even Simpson was not allowed to shed weight, which is saying something, because she’d delivered a baby a month before rehearsals started.

When she first auditioned, Simpson was five months pregnant, 15 years old and commuting from Far Rockaway, which is as far away as it sounds.

McKay says they wrestled with whether to pursue her, whether it would be fair to her or her child, and brought her in a half-dozen more times before deciding. In the end, they chose not to judge or stereotype her, just as the film doesn’t judge or stereotype its characters.

“She’d bring the baby to rehearsals, sometimes with her mom, sometimes with a friend. Sometimes I’m holding the baby in one hand and the script in the other,” McKay says. “So it was intense for her. She’s up all night and coming into the shoot. I think it brought a lot to the experience, having this young mom around.”