Girl Trouble

Well, that guy’s getting a kick out of it.” In her sunny backyard in Venice, California, filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke points out the guy who has stopped working on a neighbor’s roof to watch as she and a journalist get a lesson in “the belly roll” from 15-year-old Nikki Reed. “Just roll your stomach,” Reed urges as the women struggle to copy the slinky dance move she performs to unsettling perfection in Thirteen, a stunning first feature she and Hardwicke made together last year. Giggly and sweet, Reed seems like the archetypal California girl, yet as she and Hardwicke make clear, talking comfortably over ginger ale on Hardwicke’s patio, teen life isn’t all laughter, light, and the belly roll.

Hollywood’s take on the terrors of moving from girlhood into full-grown femininity has run the gamut from Lolita’s siren call to Carrie’s really bad first menstrual cycle. But for Thirteen’s writer-director Hardwicke and writer-actor Reed, the scary stuff is the honest-to-goodness emotional life and times of a teenager on the verge.

Thirteen is the story of sensitive Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), whose adolescent angst leaves her vulnerable to an intimate but destructive friendship with wild child Evie (Reed). The film debuted this year at Sundance, where it won Hardwicke a directing award and caused a sensation with its remarkable performances, its frank take on teen sex and drugs, and, as Holly Hunter (who plays Tracy’s overwhelmed mother) puts it, its “slash-and-burn” energy. Not to mention that Reed actually was 13 when she and Hardwicke wrote the script, basing it on her own experiences. And though the details of her story have been changed, the film’s blunt portrayal of acid trips, body piercings, precocious sexuality, and shoplifting ventures on Melrose Avenue has a telling immediacy that boldly sets it apart.

For years, Hardwicke and Reed have nurtured a relationship that’s part best buds, part surrogate-mother–and–child. Reed was four when Hardwicke—who smilingly declines to give her age—began dating Reed’s dad (the two are no longer an item, but remain friends). “Nikki was always creative and funny,” says the director, formerly a production designer who worked on such films as Three Kings and Vanilla Sky. “Then, when she was about 12 or 13, it was like there was a new Nikki. She was angry at everybody. She hated the world.”