Rebel alliance

All Over Me is a good Cause

by Gerald Peary

Directed by Alex Sichel. Written by Sylvia Sichel. With Alison Folland, Tara Subkoff, Cole Hauser, Wilson Cruz, Ann Dowd, Leisha Hailey, and Pat Briggs. A Fine Line Features release. At the Avon Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Wiggle over, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. There's a today's teen almost as sensitive, as feeling, who, in a humble way on screen, suffers almost as sublimely and seems practically as

sage-like. Only she's a girl. I'm talking of our own Alison Folland, 18, a Cambridge high-school senior who stole the show as the chubby student in Gus Van Sant's To Die For. She's even more brilliant in All over Me, whether rollerblading down the sidewalk in an inimitably chunky fashion or breaking down in tragic tears while dancing fiercely to a doomed Patti Smith song.

And slide over, Brothers Coen. All over Me is a thrilling first film from the talented Sichel sisters, director Alex and screenwriter Sylvia. Like Joel and Ethan, these New York siblings are super-close and work collaboratively on the set. But departing from the genre-driven Coens (and keying a difference of male and female filmmakers?), the Sichels in their initial film deeply personal and somewhat autobiographical.

As they explained recently in Boston: Alex, a graduate of the Columbia University film school, had a pain-provoking friendship with her best girl pal. "And if you're a self-destructive teenage girl, which I was," says Sylvia, now a successful playwright, "you go for the bad boy. That seemed empowering."

The Sichels' wounded adolescences are refracted in this fictional friendship between intense New York high-school girls, Folland's Claude and her skinny mini-Jean Harlow schoolmate, Ellen (Tara Subkoff) -- a friendship that's threatened when Ellen falls giddily in love with Mark (a frightening Cole Hauser), the thick-necked, gay-bashing, neighborhood bully.

The Sichels are maestros at documenting what girls do behind shut doors. In All over Me's opening, Claude and Ellen lie around lazily for hours after school, sometimes strumming (badly) their unplugged guitars, dreaming vaguely of having a band. Claude's the more pensive one, Ellen the more wired, but the affection between them is palpable, as is the sensual charge: Ellen showing off her hot red bra, or the two of them dry humping as boy and girl before a carnival-like mirror.

Claude's bedroom becomes their sanctuary, where Ellen, estranged from her family (they're never shown in the film), spends weeks at a time sleeping over. Ellen's eternal visitation is okay with Claude's distracted, well-meaning mother, who is too obsessed keeping her new boyfriend to notice what's going on. Mom is man-crazy -- and just at the moment when a new boy-crazy, thrill-crazy Ellen starts to emerge.

To Claude's chagrin, Ellen babbles on about Mark, and then liquefies when she talks with Mark on the phone. Ellen races into the street for a chance to slip her scraggy little body (she wobbles on her high heels like a new-born colt) beneath Mark's muscular arm. As Alex Sichel points out, "There are a lot of movies about Mark. I think we reframed the story a bit. Instead of focussing on that guy, we looked at the women affected by him."

Ellen loses her fragile confidence and spends the second half of All over Me reeling off-balance from drugs and alcohol (this gets a bit much) and spewing out her poisoned insides. Claude saves her, defends her, mothers her, but ultimately it's all useless. Yes, Claude is in love with Ellen, but she's savvy enough to realize she's losing her forever.

There are times when the Sichel sisters' cinematic inexperience shows, in some indulgent physical scenes, in failures to establish locales so we're not sure whose apartment we're in, and at moments in which the editing clips the action and screws up the rhythm. But these failures can be forgiven a movie whose articulation of the pains and pangs of adolescence recalls the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause.

In fact, All over Me is a Rebel Without a Cause for the 1990s, with its 24-hour day-and-night of angst, the requisite ineffectual parents, questions of peer loyalty versus involving the police. There's a tender homoerotic verbal relationship between a Gen X young man new on the block and a worshipful teenage boy (My So-Called Life's Wilson Cruz) thatbrings Rebel's James Dean/Sal Mineo gay subtext to the surface.

But what's radically fresh from the Sichels is the girl-girl intensity at the center. As Claude gives up one female, she discovers another, less self-destructive one, a blue-haired nice girl (Leisha Hailey) in a rock band (led by Helium's wonderful Mary Timony). It's subtle, emotive stuff as they get together, a righteous romance set up by the Sichels for every one to applaud.