American girl, nostalgic version

"Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" is a throwback to a bygone era; you can tell because its heroine wants to work for a newspaper.

The movie is set amid the Depression, a tough time for hobos, but a Big Rock Candy Mountain for broadsheets — every big city had several, people read them eagerly, and they were an essential part of metropolitan vitality.

So, plucky Kit (Abigail Breslin, continuing her Hearstlike domination of preteen female roles), a girl coming of age in the 1930s, naturally wants to be a reporter, a kindred spirit to Hildy Johnson (circa Rosalind Russell).

She marches into the office of a Cincinnati newspaper editor (Wallace Shawn) and presents her story about the World's Fair. He admires her pluck, but tells her to come back when she's got something the paper can really use.

Kit is too naive, or too stubborn, to realize the translation is "get lost." She launches an investigation into the strange goings-on at the boardinghouse her mother (Julia Ormand) operates to make ends meet while dad (Chris O'Donnell) is away looking for work.

There are tramps in the neighborhood, and thefts occurring. This troubles the kooky tenants and assorted colorful locals — a magician (Stanley Tucci), a mobile librarian (Joan Cusack), a man-hungry single gal (Jane Krakowski) and so forth.

Are the hobos really to blame? Are there more sinister forces at work?

Kit and her kiddie confederates investigate, leading to some moderate danger, but mostly to expected lessons about compassion, in keeping with the wholesomeness of the American Girl brand.

The brand is protected, but perhaps at the expense of the movie, which older viewers will view with diminishing good will, as characters remain locked into rigid, limited dimensions. Poor Julia Ormand probably contracted RSI from the constant hand-wringing she does as she looks longingly out the window, waiting for her husband to return.

As for Kit, you get exactly one guess as to whether she gets a byline on a story about how the scapegoated hobos are just regular folk, down on their luck.

It's corny (or as we say today, ethanolly), but maybe it provides insight as to why American Girl stories are drawn from a nostalgia-tinged past.

Today's American girl is using her cell phone to photograph attacks on homeless men, and posting them on YouTube. *

Produced by Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Lisa Gillan, Ellen L. Brothers, Julie Goldstein, directed by Patricia Rozema, written by Ann Peacock, music by Joseph Vitarelli, distributed by Picturehouse.