I don’t know how many times I have to explain this. Look, you cannot title a non-porn film Dirty Girl and expect to make your money back. The masses aren’t going to pay money to see Dirty Girl, Sex Drive or anything with Orgy in the title. End of story.
Dirty Girl is a training film the same way pubescent girls wear training bras. It’s a teen film, and it hints at sex, but there is no sex and the themes of getting a prom date or finessing a clique are sadly missing. Instead we’re going to give you pre-starmaker performances while the school’s tramp and homosexual hijack a car and drive cross-country to meet her dad for the first time. It’s off-beat.
Juno Temple picks right up from when I last saw her in Kaboom as an insatiable nymphomaniac. We first discover Danielle riding in the backseat of a car, ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyado. Nothing is shown, of course, but the voiceover tells us she’s on top, which is the position of power. Now girls, the rhetoric may be tempting, but “being on top” during underage sex as a form of empowerment? Yeah, and burqas are empowering, too.
Shortly after, Danielle is demoted to “the retard class” (not my words) where she is artificially partnered with Clarke (Jeremy Dozier), almost certainly the only out-of-the-closet kid in 1987 Norman, Oklahoma. Danielle and Clarke are a 
natural team because they’ve alienated everybody else in their lives. Danielle’s mom, Sue-Ann (Milla Jovovich) puts the final nail in the coffin by deciding to partner with Mormon Ray (William H. Macy). Danielle so detests Mormonism and Mormon Ray, she just has to bail with Clarke in search of her real father [read: the plot]. See, that’s funny, right? It wasn’t. Nor were the ten minutes in which three separate characters, including both leads, performed PG-rated strip-tease shows. (Personally, I’m betting first time director Abe Sylvia wanted to make porn, but couldn’t go through with it.)
Dwight Yoakam & Tim McGraw play the fathers of Clarke and Danielle, respectively. Say, now I know Billy Ray Cyrus has been all over daughter Miley’s career, but when was the last time a non-musical film had two country-singing father figures? I wonder if it had Jerry Reed and Kris Kistofferson. I digress.
We’ve seen these teen project movies before, no? Some are good starmakers, others less. Problem is Dirty Girl has neither the depth of Welcome to the Doll House nor Hard Candy, and it isn’t as funny as Napoleon Dynamite or Detroit Rock City. And as it hasn’t got the standard teen themes or message, Dirty Girl is left without an audience. Who goes to a film like this? Me. Why? So that if Jeremy Dozier wins an Oscar 15 years from now, I can turn to the person next to me and have the following conversation:
“I saw his first film, Dirty Girl.”
“Any good?”
“No. Not really.”
Rated R, 90 Minutes
D: Abe Sylvia
W: Abe Sylvia
Genre: Rookie
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Collectors
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Teens
