Dirty Girl

“Nobody likes a dirty girl”

I was apprehensive about this movie. I wasn’t familiar with Juno Temple from anything else, and I wasn’t intrigued by the plot of “high school harlot and gay classmate (Jeremy Dozier) team-up to learn some life lessons with a Home Economics flour sack baby” frame in 1987 Oklahoma. Still, the movie passed over the circulation desk frequently and my co-worker wasn’t familiar with it either to give any review. The case indicated that the film’s supporting cast was stacked – William H. Macy, Milla Jovovich, Mary Steenburgen, Tim McGraw(?)… – someone needed to give it a chance.

Juno Temple’s character, Danielle, goes on a mission to find the biological father she never knew after being placed into the Challengers remedial education program at school, more based on her promiscuous behavior and attitude than her intelligence. It is in the Challengers program that she meets Clarke, a shy gay classmate, who has an emotionally and physically abusive father and a loving but strained mother (strained in terms of being pulled in both the directions of her duty to her husband and love her son). Clarke and Danielle are paired together in a Home Economics project where they must “take care” of a flour sack as it was their own child. As each of them has very a unstable family life, they ponder the identities they’ve created themselves – the “dirty girl” and the “shy homo kid”. With the assemblage of cast, there are quite a few twists and turns to get to the end – which have been negatively reviewed. Temple and Dozier give the characters depth and anchor the story from flying off into space. I was delighted by the peaks and pits of the conclusion. Remember — life isn’t a fairy tale, but bad moments are often outweighed by the bad.

Thumbs: 1 out of 2

Have you seen anything with Juno Temple in it?