Starring Raven Adamson and Katie Coseni. Rated PG.

The material practically screams out to be sensationalized. “Fifties schoolgirls gone wild! Rebelles without a cause!” But French director Laurent Cantet prefers the exact opposite approach in his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire, the story of an Eisenhower-era girl gang that takes on a town of misogynists.

Cantet strives here for the same restrained naturalism that won him a Palme d’Or for The Class, his portrait of an inner-city Parisian school. But despite spot-on production design and an obvious sensitivity to the material, the director is defeated here by his trademark technique of using rookie actors and unhurried storytelling.

Too bad, because the material is compelling, steeped as it is in a time when women were expected to be either passive good girls whose only aspiration was secretary school, or, quite simply, bad girls. It’s a welcome look at the darker, more complicated side of the glossy 1950s America of sock hops and drive-ins. Here, the androgynous Legs (Raven Adamson), unwanted daughter of the town drunk, leads the gang of misfits, which starts out fairly unthreateningly with acts of vandalism and revenge against mean math teachers and town perverts. But their acts slowly escalate into more dangerous terrain and the group starts to self-destruct on the remote farm it’s turned into an increasingly cultlike headquarters.

Everything here looks right for small-town America of the era, with old brick storefronts, streets full of pastel-hue Packards and Chevys, and dial telephones, handpainted billboards, and Arborite tables at every turn. There’s some gorgeous lensing, too, often in wide shots. One impressive tableau finds a group of James Dean wannabes working on an old car outside an abandoned factory, the wind gusting around them ominously as one of the town bad girls gets raped inside. This is not Happy Days.

But the amateurish acting and the lax, too-true-to-the-book script keep Foxfire from really igniting. Adamson has an enigmatic magnetism, but the narration by Maddy (Katie Coseni) is clunky, and the references to upstate New York and its “Negroes” seem incongruous with the strong Canadian accents in this Canuck-French copro. And the anachronistic use of the F word, especially “What the fuck”? You get the feeling something’s been lost in translation.