Film: A mature Thirteen

Onomatopoeia is the word you're looking for; the name for a word that audibly mimics the sound or the idea it describes. Surely, there's no more revolting word than puberty. It's redolent with oily-haired awkwardness, squirming sexuality and all the shudderingly heinous attributes of that down-and-dirty plunge into adulthood.

 Puberty is seventh grade, watching your friends grow six inches and two cup sizes overnight. It's about Early Bloomers and Late Bloomers, and hating your parents for using words like "blooming" in the first place. More than anything, it's the mad dash to the experienced, been-there-done-that self-assurance of a finish line that doesn't exist. Thirteen is the story of That Girl. She's the one who does everything first and wields experience like a weapon, leaving an entourage of adoring innocents in her wake. Fifteen-year-old Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the script with director Catherine Hardwicke at age thirteen, stars as Evie, the manipulative it-girl of a working class California suburb. Evan Rachel Wood plays Tracy, the apprentice, who goes from sweet little girl to drugged-out kiddie criminal in the space of a semester.

 Hardwicke's film, winner of a Director's Award at this year's Sundance Festival, tells the extreme side of a typical phenomenon and sneers at the dreamy angst of traditional coming-of-age stories. Admittedly, huffing glue, jacking wallets and occasional threesomes aren't typical middle school fare. Yet the film is so awkwardly, intimately evocative of adolescence that its conclusion cultivates an overwhelming sense of relief, artfully disguised as grown-up smugness.

 Thank God that's all over with, we think, carefully and casually refusing to look any deeper. Growing up is kid stuff. This is something else.