Towelhead is a difficult movie. It is a disturbing and frank coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old Arab-American girl but it’s heavy-handed and rings false as often as it rings unsettlingly true. Writer/director Alan Ball indulges in the themes he finds interesting: suburbia is hell, people are trivial, and above all, heterosexual males turn into ravenous dogs when they’re presented with a pretty underage girl.

He explored all that in his screenplay for American Beauty, which still remains one of my favorite films. In Towelhead, though, there’s a heavier political bent and a more disgusted view of humanity.

The girl is Jasira (pronounced Jazeera), played by Summer Bishil, who was eighteen when the movie was shot but does a pretty accurate thirteen-year-old. She lives with her mom (Maria Bello) in Syracuse, but when the mom’s boyfriend innocently asks Jasira if he can shave her pubic hair for her, she’s sent to Texas to live with her Lebanese-born father Rifat (Peter Macdissi).

Bello, cradling a crying Jasira in her arms as she sends her away, informs her between tears that “this is your fault.” This kind of unrealistically on-the-nose dialogue is common in Towelhead for its shock value, but here in particular it strikes a central theme of the movie: Jasira is a growing young girl with a dangerous effect on everyone around her, and they all blame her for it.

Rifat, the father, is a true original. He’s proudly American and anti-Saddam (the movie takes place during the first Gulf War), with a good job at NASA, but is still old-fashioned, with no idea what to do about Jasira. He slaps her for wearing short-short pajamas; he forbids her from seeing her African-American boyfriend (clueless that this would make her want to see him more), and informs her, after she gets her period, that tampons are only for married women. He’s unlikable (well, like almost everyone else in the story) and, most interesting of all, prissy. When he gets a new girlfriend, he ignores Jasira altogether.

Jasira soon gets a job babysitting the ten-year-old boy of the redneck family two doors down. The boy’s father, Travis (Aaron Eckhart), takes a special liking to Jasira, who herself has taken a special liking to the nude magazines. And has recently discovered masturbation. Which she does while in class.

I think you kind of get the idea. There will no doubt be a lot of walkouts, even among people who did in fact realize they were going to see a movie called Towelhead. I used to work at a video store, and I can’t tell you how many times people informed me that they turned off American Beauty five minutes in, after they saw Kevin Spacey masturbating in the shower.

For those of you who don’t mind feeling queasy and uncomfortable for