The First Weekend Club will be presenting Grown Up Movie Star on July 22 as part of the Canada Screens Vancouver film series. The event, held at District 319 (319 Main Street), will include a wine reception and a post-screening Q&A session via Skype with director Adriana Maggs. Tickets ($15) can be purchased on-line and must be bought before July 21 at 5 p.m. The film is also the FWC DVD Club's pick for DVD of the month. Here is a review of the film by the Georgia Straight's Janet Smith.

Starring Shawn Doyle and Tatiana Maslany.

Grown Up Movie Star is all about sexual awakening, but when people get hot and bothered here, it’s often wince-inducing.

That’s a good thing. Writer-director Adriana Maggs understands the exquisite pain and awkwardness of coming of age, a process as rocky and unforgiving as the bleak, ice-encrusted Newfoundland coast where she sets her first feature. Watching her main character, the 13-year-old Ruby, entangle herself in riskier and riskier sexual fumblings, you can’t help but think of Catherine Breillat—if she grew up on the Rock and a steady diet of Codco, that is.

Ruby (Tatiana Maslany) has just witnessed her enraged mom take off for L.A. and a movie-star pipe dream. That leaves her and her little sister with their father, Ray (Shawn Doyle), a disgraced NHL player who drinks and smokes up to forget his fallen glory. In her spiral to find herself, Ruby is getting a reputation as the town “slut”—wearing her mother’s cast-off coats and arty hats and offering blow jobs to the new guy in school (another not-at-all-sexy moment).

By far the most compelling, and disturbing, relationship centres on Ruby and Stuart (Jonny Harris), a photographer who uses a wheelchair, and his disability complicates things. He’s a friend of her father’s, although their own ties are also burdened by past trauma, and it’s a dance of flirtation, frustration, and desperation—so loaded you can barely breathe when they’re holed up for nighttime camera sessions in his dismal mobile home. A sample painful detail: she’s wearing pseudo-glam Olsen twins outfits Stuart ordered by catalogue.

Maggs does try to pack an awful lot of baggage, and damaged people, into one tiny town. An even bigger problem is that Maslany, though clearly gifted, cannot possibly be 13; in fact, she’s more than 10 years older and has a wisdom that undercuts her character’s wild-child naiveté.

And yet this small, unpolished movie gets under your skin. Maybe it’s the fact that Maggs is so unpretentious, using a kitchen-sink style and a tone-perfect indie-folk soundtrack. Or maybe it’s just because she and her actors are so fearless. How many directors would have stopped the camera outside Stuart’s window?