"Crazy/Beautiful"

There isn't a lot of teen silliness in "Crazy/Beautiful." Though this is a world where girls just wanna have fun, a degree of menace is always lurking in the background. When Nicole and Maddy descend upon a straitlaced high school football game in their midriff tops and hip-hugger jeans, zonked out on any number of unnamed substances, they're joyously wayward girls. (The other kids look like dullards next to them.) But you can't help fearing for them; their recklessness, the very thing that fills them with life, is also fraught with potential danger.

Stockwell has succeeded in making a movie that resonates in spite of itself: Running scared last year after the Federal Trade Commission scolded studios for foisting unwholesome material on kids, Touchstone demanded that Stockwell make significant cuts to "Crazy/Beautiful." Consequently, we never see Nicole and Maddy getting high, or even really drinking: We're left to read the clues found in drowsy muscles and glazed eyes.

What's more, the cutting renders one segment practically nonsensical: We see Nicole at a party, obviously stoned out of her mind and possibly having partaken in some kind of desperate sexual misadventure. But the details aren't even suggested -- they've simply been lopped out. We're left to wonder exactly what happened. As Stockwell, clearly frustrated, said in Newsweek, "We were trying to make a cautionary tale, and we couldn't show the behavior we were trying to caution people away from."

But even though it was mashed under the thumb of Disney's authority (and, really, should we have expected anything different from Uncle Walt's Evil Empire?), "Crazy/Beautiful" still manages to succeed on its own terms. That's partly owing to Stockwell's good sense, and his obvious openness to his actors. The movie scores some lovely-looking moments, too, thanks to cinematographer Shane Hurlbut: Carlos' early-morning bus ride to school is bathed in that authentic 6 a.m. light, light that's a bit too raw and beautiful for most half-awake human beings to bear.

But it's Dunst's movie, and her performance cuts deep. Adorable as ever, she drapes this latest character with layers of desperate, nameless, teenage sadness. She may be strung out half the time, but she doesn't drift through the movie in a daze: What's so painful, and so moving, about her performance is that she's bracingly alive every minute. Her self-inflicted numbness is a defense against suffering, but not a solution to it. And when she looks into Carlos' eyes, she gives the sense of, momentarily at least, seeing her way clear.

That's a heavily romantic notion, that one human being can save another from destruction with nothing but pure love. But if you're going to tangle with that idea, a teen romance is the place to do it. With their whole lives ahead of them, it was ridiculous for Romeo and Juliet to off themselves with poison and daggers, but anyone who doesn't understand why they did so is simply missing the point. In "Crazy/Beautiful," the lovers save themselves just in time, and their 11th-hour good judgment is, if not a guarantee of a happy ending, at least an affirmation that they'll be able to find their way. Kids today, they're more sensible than they were in the 16th century. But they still make for a damn good story.

• View blog reactions