Only the Brave

Four girls smoke joints and torch trees. Another saga of wild, nihilistic teenagers? Not quite. While her friend Vicki is disruptive at school, seemingly an easy score for the local blokes, and keen to try her luck as a singer, Alex is more introspective: wary of losing her virginity, fascinated by literature, and haunted by the fact that her mum abandoned herself and her dad to go and live in Sydney. Neither girl has much of a life; both, in the end, are determined to get out of town, separately or together, depending on whether their friendship can withstand the tensions that arise when Alex develops an interest in the woman who teaches her English. Tough and unsentimental, the film nevertheless suffers from slightly awkward performances and from the fact that, for the first half at least, its two leads are not as sympathetically drawn as they might be.