OxfordPress.com

Grade: A-

Verdict: A rousing female twist on the "Rocky" tale.

Details: Starring Michelle Rodriguez and Santiago Douglas. Rated R for profanity. One hour, 50 minutes.

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Review: When teenager Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) stares out her tenement window at a young woman struggling home with an infant and a toddler, you know she's afraid she's glimpsing her own future.

If not winding up pregnant, the most she can expect is a dead-end job. "Your mother was a receptionist in a very nice office," her father Sandro (Paul Calderon) tells her. That's about the best life anyone in her Brooklyn neighborhood can hope for her.

But in "Girlfight," writer-director Karyn Kusama's rousing debut, Diana decides to buck the self-fulfilling prophecies of urban surrender. Only one fistfight away from getting expelled from school, the trigger-tempered girl decides to channel her anger into boxing lessons at the gym where her kid brother Tiny (Ray Santiago) trains. She isn't exactly welcomed with open arms. "Why not aerobics?" one of the old regulars asks her.

When a bully messing with Tiny winds up at the business end of Diana fist, he sneers, "I guess you never learned how to be a lady." No, not by his terms. But she learns how to take care of - and control - herself, even though she has to learn to punch without her father finding out.

Kusama's film, a winner of the director's award and grand jury prize at Sundance, plus the Young Cinema Award at the Cannes Film Festival, is a mix of clean storytelling, tough edge and gritty urban texture. The movie is produced by Maggie Renzi, longtime producer (and longtime companion) of independent film director John Sayles, who makes a cameo here as Diana's distracted math teacher. The association is appropriate. In her very first feature, Kusama delivers a work that shares Sayles' attraction to a working-class settings. "Girlfight" also has some of Sayles' clear-eyed but tender understanding of its characters. Everyone here has more than one side, and Kusama loves their foibles as much as their strengths.

She's also not immune to a shameless sort of plot twist that threatens to pit Diana against her own, newfound boxing boyfriend Adrian (Santiago Douglas) in the ring. The growing relationship between these two is as interesting as the fighting matches (which Kusama stages dynamically). We see how both Adrian and Diana gather self-worth first from their wins on the mat, then through the respect they give each other. As young as they are, they're both veterans of the rough life.

When he describes their relationship as a kind of war, she replies, "Maybe life's just war, period." But "Girlfight" believably shows them learning how to win, or at least stay up on their feet. It's a crowdpleaser that never sacrifices its brain to the sucker-punch tricks of so many Hollywood films.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service