‘Towelhead’ fails as coming of age tale

If "Thirteen" left any gaps in the number of ways a teenage girl can find trouble, "Towelhead" fills them in.

This is an oddball period piece/character study about a half-Lebanese girl coming of age in a backward Texas suburb where her strict but distracted (and divorced) father leaves her to her own devices.

In her ample spare time, she indulges her growing fascination with sexual arousal. First on her own, then with a married neighbor, then a teen boyfriend. Ultimately, she finds a way to juggle all three.

She keeps this well out of view of dad (Peter Macdissi), whose old-country values impose strict limits on how a young girl might express or even admit to having sexual feelings. He also forbids her to see her boyfriend when he finds out the young man is black.

"Towelhead" is a curious, sometimes messy mixture of tensions that arise from racial, sexual situations. The title promises some sort of inquiry into the problems of being an Arab girl in a racist neighborhood, but that aspect fades in and out, and the movie becomes preoccupied with her physical desire.

Sometimes the movie doesn't seem to know where to direct its focus. For example, when her father finds out that she's had sex with her boyfriend, the subject of the scene is dad's racism, not the fact that the girl has been the victim of statutory rape (a situation the movie consistently downplays or tables).

A narrative this complex calls out for subtle handling, but "Towelhead" (maybe the title should have tipped us) is drawn in broad strokes by writer-director Alan Ball.

I think I mentally checked out when I realized that Ball had positioned the girl between two sets of neighbors, polar good and polar bad - a flag-flying reservist with a pickup truck (Aaron Eckhart as the resident sexual predator) and two soulful hippies just back from the Peace Corps.

"Towelhead" is adapted from Alicia Erian's novel by writer-director Ball, who penned "American Beauty" and is obviously fascinated by dissatisfied suburban men with weight sets, soft-porn collections and a lascivious interest in teen girls. Also by bigoted men for whom excess displays of patriotism/militarism disguise some inner demons.

He spread those qualities among Kevin Spacey and Chris Cooper in "Beauty," but here concentrates them all in Eckhart's character. Or should I say caricature. Eckhart's a good actor, but he's not believable for a second as this one-dimensional yahoo.

Summer Bishil does well in an impressively large, demanding role as a vulnerable girl trying to navigate adolescence alone in a unfriendly neighborhood. It's meant to be Texas, but for all the realism it exhibits, it might as well be Oz. *

Produced by Alan Ball and Ted Hope, written and directed by Alan Ball, music by Thomas Newman, distributed by Warner Bros.