Made before X-Men 3, Juno and this month’s Smart People, this early Ellen Page vehicle shows her to be a star-in-waiting capable of rising above so-so material. Sporting lip ring, DMs and manky locks, her teenaged wild child Sherry makes an ideal recruit for SPARK (‘Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge’), an itinerant Manson-esque group criss-crossing Europe preaching self-help to junkies. Her love for leader Harry (Eric Thal) quickly palls, however, once he shaves her head, steals her cherry and adds her mom to his batty band of acolytes. Inspired by director Alison Murray’s own brushes with wacky activists, this works fine as a showcase for Page’s puckish charisma. The interpretative dance routines are terrible, though, while the scene involving a driverless van seems a fitting metaphor given the plot’s improbable trajectory.
