GRADE: B+

For the first reel of Girls Town, you just can't get over Lili Taylor. Is it possible to remain unperturbed that a woman of this age is playing a high school student? Harder still, can you avoid astonishment at how perfect she is in the part? With the sure, showy expertise of a De Niro, Taylor imbues unwed mother Patti with all the faux fuck-you confidence she can muster. It's a deeply felt, dead-on performance, and by the halfway point you've forgiven Taylor her own maturity. For all its verite pretenses, Girls Town is less about a bunch of high-schoolers than it is about a movie director and a cadre of writer-performers examining their own feelings about rape, relationships, and American womanhood.

The movie's opening scenes sketch an easy friendship between a group of four smart/sassy high school outsiders on the verge of graduation: Patti, Angela (Bruklin Harris), Emma (Anna Grace), and Nikki (Aunjanue Ellis). But about 10 minutes into the film, we get word that Nikki has swallowed a fistful of pills and bowed out of life. The remaining girls manage to smuggle Nikki's diary out of her grieving mother's home, and page through it at Patti's place, investigating the root of Nikki's despair. What they find is cruel and galvanizing -- Nikki had been raped by an editor at a newspaper where she interned, and was privately questioning the sanity and value of a world where such a thing could happen.

Shell-shocked by the truth of the matter, the three girls begin to talk among themselves and come to a realization about their own lives. Emma says she was raped last year on a date with a football player. Patti's barely sympathetic, wondering what the hell Emma thought she was doing with her shirt off in a jock's car. And anyway, Patti's had her own share of guys who wouldn't take no for an answer. Pained, acrimonious debate ensues as the trio grow more and more angry -- angry about the impossibility of saying no, and angry with themselves for being weak, for being naive, for putting up with it. "Why do we put up with it?" Emma finally asks, once the argument has reached a fever pitch. "We try to talk about it, and look what happens. We fight for 20 minutes."

There's the admirable crux of this picture. Girls Town is a political film, in that it calls for action. But it's incomplete-it's never quite sure how to justify that action, or what form it should take. The trio become crusaders for their right to dignity, and it's surely one of this year's most stirring movie moments when Emma lobs a concrete block through the passenger-side window of that damn jock's car (doing the right thing?). They hang out in the bathroom, chatting incessantly and scrawling slogans and naming names on the door to a toilet stall. "Subvert the patriarchy," Emma writes, and then starts a hall of shame list underneath that other students begin to contribute to. The girls silence their hecklers, take revenge on the deadbeat father of Patti's child, and eventually come face-to-face with Nikki's tormentor. Still, the movie has a desperately unfinished quality, and none of these subsequent exploits is particularly satisfying. (You keep waiting for someone to call the cops on these brazen girls, but nobody thinks of it.) Perhaps searching for a resolution missing from the material at hand, the film borrows its epigraphs from Audre Lorde and Queen Latifah ("Who you callin' a bitch?"). The points are well taken, but they should have been unnecessary.

Long on characterization but a little short on story, Girls Town is less than it could have been, and too self-congratulatory for my own taste. Director Jim McKay is best known as a consort of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe (he directed the nearly unwatchable Tourfilm for that band), and Girls Town is his first foray into feature filmmaking. The movie was created and scripted by committee, but McKay and his lead performers had to shoot on a shoestring when, predictably, the group couldn't secure funding.

Then again, Girls Town on a budget would hardly be the same film. The movie's slapdash quality is key to its significance. Truth be told, all three of the leads look too wise for high school, but that's OK -- there's a once-removed quality to their fine, spontaneous performances, as the women take a very skillful look back at the girls they once were, the girls they wish they had been, or some combination. For all its flaws, this one gets extra points for having its uncertain head and heart in the same noble place.