Fearless performance

Elizabeth Wood’s White Girl is a confounding piece of work. Based loosely on the first-time writer-director’s real life story, it’s an audacious, positively nightmarish look at depravity, youth and white privilege, anchored by a promising new vision that’s bold and unflinching, but also quite intimate and rather sympathetic. It’s a tale driven by sex, cocaine, money, liquor, weed, criminals and poor motivators, and as such, it’s often an excessive and repetitive film, one that — like several “edgy” 20-somethings — is never quite becomes as shocking as it hopes, even if it’s as unwavering as can be. It’s not a bad film, by an means; it’s just an insistent and unpleasant one. But it’s one that shines brightly under lead actress Morgan Saylor, a radiant, present and richly expressive young actress giving a career-defining performance in this unhinged indie. At its best, White Girl works as a platform for this rising talent, one that’s as raw and fearless as they come these days, in a film that wishes it could say the same — and sometimes can: http://www.cutprintfilm.com/reviews/white-girl/