Time out for bad behavior

In one theater at the multiplex this weekend, you can watch “What a Girl Wants” and see a precocious, likable teenager choose the perfect gown to wear to a heady bash. In another, you can watch “Better Luck Tomorrow” and see a precocious, likable teenager choose the perfect weapon to bash in someone’s head.

Movies about teenagers are as old as Mickey Rooney, but rarely has their tone diverged so dramatically. Following a torrent of raunchy sex comedies like “American Pie” and “Road Trip” and sugary fantasies such as “The Princess Diaries” and “She’s All That,” films about adolescence are abruptly turning a lot more serious and real, particularly in the art-house world.

Ditching the predictable dilemmas over whom to invite to the prom, this new crop of teenage tales addresses complex issues that many teens wrestle with every day -- except in most Hollywood movies: Should I do drugs? If so, before ... or during school? Should I have sex? If so, with a member of the same sex ... or a teacher?

Many of these provocative new movies are being made by relatively young filmmakers rebelling against an endless stream of films that see adolescence as little more than a handy excuse to shop and party. And rather than populate their films with familiar faces plucked from television sitcoms, these directors are casting their movies with novices, hoping to maintain as much verisimilitude as possible.

“I always saw movies [about teens] and would say, ‘Who are these people?’ ” says Karen Moncrieff, the 39-year-old writer-director of “Blue Car.” “I like going to the movies to see the real deal. I’m a fan of cinema of discomfort. I just hope you can look at [“Blue Car”] and say, ‘I recognize some of those feelings.’ ”

It will take some work. These new films are miles from the Cosmo Girl! wish fulfillment proffered by teen phenoms Amanda Bynes (“What a Girl Wants”) and Mandy Moore (“How to Deal”). Although Hollywood has dipped cautiously into such provocative waters as interracial love with “Save the Last Dance,” the studio movies invariably provide a sentimental, “Happy Days” view of tough teen problems.

In “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” star Hilary Duff struggles to conquer stage fright and snag a hot guy. In “What a Girl Wants,” Bynes tries to reconcile her single mother with her long-lost father -- who just happens to be dashing nobility and as rich as Bill Gates. But in the world of these other movies, here’s what more lifelike teenagers are going through:

* In “Better Luck Tomorrow,” which opened April 11, ambitious teens split their time doing drugs, cheating on tests and bludgeoning enemies. Directed and co-written by 31-year-old Justin Lin, the movie brings the corporate culture of win-at-all-costs entitlement into high school, with terrifying results.

* The title character in “Raising Victor Vargas,” which debuted in Los Angeles on Friday, survives adolescence without parents in a squalid apartment. Written and directed by 27-year-old Peter Sollett, it’s about how a young man struggles to create a life for himself without abandoning his siblings and grandmother.

* One teen girl in “Blue Car,” opening May 2, is counseled by a teacher who’s a pedophile; her younger sister mutilates herself and pours salt in the wounds. Abandoned by their father and living with an overwhelmed mother, Moncrieff’s two young characters essentially try to raise themselves.

* “Sweet Sixteen,” due out May 23, follows an otherwise caring young Scottish boy who deals drugs and becomes a fearless gangster in an earnest effort to support his fracturing family. Directed by veteran filmmaker Ken Loach, it’s such an authentic glimpse of unfamiliar street life that it’s subtitled, even though everyone speaks English.

* One misfit teen in “Camp,” to be released July 25, is trampled by classmates for being a drag queen, while another kid’s parents wire her jaw shut so she will lose weight. Writer-director Todd Graff, who’s 43, lets some of the young characters attending theater camp fall in love, but unlike other movies, their romance ends the second summer does.

* In the first scene of “Thirteen,” premiering Aug. 20, two young girls huff aerosol propellant fumes and then numbly punch each other in the face. When they are not piercing themselves or squeezing into thongs and low-rise jeans, the girls in filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke’s drama are hooking up with nearly every boy they meet.

As bold as these movies might be thematically, history proves they are not often beautiful commercially. “Better Luck Tomorrow” opened strongly in limited release last weekend, but it so far has been the exception. For all the critical acclaim, the similarly challenging teen titles “Heavenly Creatures,” “Election,” “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “The Virgin Suicides” and “Dazed and Confused” collected a combined total that is $10 million less than what “American Pie 2” grossed in just its opening weekend.

Faced with that uphill fight, Fox Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley has been wrestling with the “Thirteen” coming-attractions trailer, trying not to make the film look too alienating to parents or too medicinal to young adults. “It’s really challenging,” she says. “But it’s important for Fox Searchlight to take on movies like this. We can’t just do ‘The Banger Sisters.’ ”

It’s not only raw subject matter that makes this class of teen films financially problematic. Most of these movies carry the weight of R ratings, which means young teens can’t even get in to see most of them. Of these six new teen movies, only one, “Camp,” is rated PG-13.

In the United Kingdom, “Sweet 16” is rated 18, the same tag given by British censors to adult movies like “Deep Inside Helen Duvall.” Consequently, William Ruane, one of “Sweet Sixteen’s” young stars -- and the person who speaks much of the film’s street-corner profanity -- can’t watch his own film.

So why would these filmmakers put up obstacles for the very audience they’re trying to attract? Because they aren’t telling the story of Walt Disney High.

“Teenagers today lead R-rated lives,” says “Thirteen’s” Hardwicke. “Find one teenager who doesn’t use a profanity more than once in conversation.”

Paul Laverty, the screenwriter of “Sweet Sixteen,” based his dialogue and his plotting on real teens he encountered around Greenock, Scotland, a once-prospering shipbuilding town now decimated by unemployment and gloom.

“Teenage times are tremendously interesting there,” Laverty says. “It is explosive. There are so many tremendous passions -- people take chances and do things that turn their lives over in a second.” Any movie that endeavors to be true to that kind of rough-and-tumble adolescence, in other words, requires kids bring along their folks to get past the ticket taker.

“I would hope kids would take their parents, but obviously I’m dreaming,” says “Better Luck Tomorrow’s” Lin. But MTV President Van Toffler isn’t so sure kids will be deterred by the film’s rating. “Kids figured out a way to get their music for free, and they’ll figure out a way to get into our movie,” he says.

All the same, the ratings frustrate the filmmakers.

“I find it really amazing that teenagers can go see horrific violence play out on screen but can’t see a movie that is emotionally graphic,” says “Blue Car’s” Moncrieff. Her film was rated R for “sexual content and language.”

That rating doesn’t seem to hurt (and may even help) gross-out sex comedies. A new sequel to “American Pie” called “American Wedding” premieres Aug. 1, and New Line is racing into theaters with “The Real Cancun,” an R-rated reality TV-style movie about crazed kids on spring break. Sample dialogue from one girl: “In Cancun, I’ll sleep with anybody that smiles at me!”

Selling R-rated movies that are a bit more subtle than wet T-shirt contests presents numerous obstacles, particularly in buying television ad time. MTV Films, which is releasing “Better Luck Tomorrow” with Paramount Pictures, can’t advertise the film on many MTV shows because of the film’s restricted rating.

“You have to accept the fact that to make a movie about what it is like to be a teen in America, you are going to lose a big part of the teen audience, because of the R rating,” says Van Toffler, president of MTV.

Studios more cautious

The distributors of these alternative teen titles have no choice but to sell their films to the adult specialized film audience, which may not be all that eager to see how harrowing teenage life has become.

Despite many challenges, these kinds of frank, sometimes disturbing chronicles of adolescence were once made by studios -- and a lot more recently than “Rebel Without a Cause” in 1955. In the 1980s, Warner Bros. released “Risky Business,” Columbia handled “Stand by Me” and Universal produced “The Breakfast Club” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” All were rated R, and all were critical and commercial hits.

During the 1990s, however, studios were absorbed by global conglomerates and their programmers turned cautious. The focus shifted to frothy spoofs like “Clueless,” fairy-tale fantasies such as “Drive Me Crazy” and gothic revenge plots, including “Cruel Intentions.” The genre became so unintentionally self-repetitious it prompted its own parody, “Not Another Teen Movie.”

When Congress and the Federal Trade Commission lambasted studios for marketing R-rated titles to young teens, the studios grew even more skittish. Disney insisted 2001’s potentially provocative “crazy/beautiful” be recut to get a PG-13 rating (it failed at the box office anyway). Meaningful teen dramas have all but disappeared from studio lineups since. Tellingly, the producer of 1989’s daring teen drama “Heathers,” Denise DiNovi, has recently made the softballs “A Walk to Remember” and “What a Girl Wants.”

Into the void have stepped half a dozen independent filmmakers. Most of these new movies are written and directed by young adults who have little life experience besides their own teenage years to use as fodder for screenplays. “Thirteen,” for instance, was co-written by then-13-year-old Nikki Reed, a Los Angeles middle school student at the time.

Several of the filmmakers say they are trying to make the kinds of movies that nobody made for them when they were growing up.

“When I was that age, there really was nothing for me to see. There wasn’t anybody like me in the movies,” says Graff, the writer-director of “Camp,” which follows a group of marginalized kids at a New York summer theater camp. Adds Sollett of “Victor Vargas”: “This is based on my experiences growing up in Bensonhurst.”

At film festival and research screenings of many of these films, audiences were frequently divided over whether the movies were overly fictitious (an argument never heard when a nerd is remade into the homecoming queen) or, somehow, too real and encouraged reckless behavior.

“ ‘I hated your movie,’ ” Hardwicke recalls being told by a parent after an early screening of “Thirteen.” “ ‘I hated it because it seemed true and it scared the hell out of me.’ ”

After an older male character in “Blue Car” takes advantage of a young girl, some preview audience members complained they didn’t like the scene. “But you’re not supposed to like the scene,” Moncrieff says. “It’s supposed to be harrowing and awful.”

Other moviegoers challenged Moncrieff about her 10-year-old mutilator, convinced that the character was too young to cut herself. “Well, I did it when I was that young,” Moncrieff admits. “And the salt in the wound? That’s not fiction.”

But is it entertainment? Thanks to around-the-clock war coverage and the barrage of reality TV programs, movies now offer an often welcome source of escapism. A year ago at this time, comedies accounted for three of the 10 highest-grossing movies of 2002. In 2003, comedies make up six of the year’s 10 most popular releases.

“Studios will keep making their [teenage] formula movies until they stop working,” says Meyer Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, which is releasing “Raising Victor Vargas.” “And right now, they are working.”

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The light and the dark

Several filmmakers and producers say Hollywood studios sugarcoat teenage life, offering nothing but superficial fantasies and raunchy sex comedies. But there’s a reason the studios stick to that kind of formula. Realistic, often troubling movies about adolescence, especially those made and released by independents, produce a fraction of the ticket sales generated by the big studios’ lightweight fare.

Here’s a comparison of the domestic box office of five popular studio teen films and five edgier teen films.

*--* The popular Earnings in millions The Princess Diaries $108.2 American Pie $102.6 Legally Blonde $96.5 Save the Last Dance $91.1 She’s All That $63.4 The edgier Election $14.9 Dazed and Confused $7.9 The Virgin Suicides $4.9 Welcome to the Dollhouse $4.2 Heavenly Creatures $3

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