Shots in the dark: growing up ain't easy. Two new movies show why

Two new films echo and reecho each other as howls from the torture chambers of the female psyche. Michelle Williams steals both as the longsuffering best friend of a voraciously needy fellow university student who manipulates and betrays her. Perhaps because of that, Miramax decided to move Prozac Nation to next January--or maybe they're standing decorously aside for the better Me Without You, which opens this month.

They play like a diptych. In Me Without You, which British director Sandra Goldbacher modeled on an all-consuming friendship from her past, Anna Friel's terminally dissatisfied Marina unleashes the same corrosive, jittery sexiness she displayed onstage in Closer and Lulu. In Erik Skjoldjaerg's Prozac Nation, Christina Ricci lets loose her arsenal of sarcasm, self-lacerating irony and cosmic disdain as she plays a dowdier Elizabeth Wurtzel than the mediagenic fox who appeared on the back of her confessional memoir.

Hardly original thinkers, Lizzie--the Wurtzel character--and Marina martyr themselves to rock. Journalism major Lizzie loses her reason while obsessively writing up Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen for Rolling Stone. Marina, a Siouxsie Sioux clone and wanna-be Clash groupie in her teens, is ravished by a punk pusher during a heroin haze. The next time we see her, during the New Romantic era, she is a bleached-blonde Tinkerbell. Her subsequent incarnation is that of a slinky Louise Brooks manque (Lulu redux). The Joy Division posters in these women's rooms connote their desperation. Call it the 'She's Lost Control" syndrome.

Narrating Wurtzel's chronicle of misery even as she inhabits it, Ricci exudes the charm of a thundercloud, while Friel's Marina is forked lightning personified. Alongside these psychodrama queens, it is Williams who establishes a climate of genuine adult suffering. Enablers as they are, her sane, generous Ruby in Prozac Nation and her questing, passionate Holly in Me Without You must learn to cut the Gordian knot before they can prosper.

At the beginning of Prozac Nation, Lizzie announces that her parents divorced before she was two. She is sitting naked on a bed when we learn that her father has virtually disappeared from her life: The relaying of this information over an image of her at her most sexually vulnerable is blunt but persuasive. Turning up when Lizzie's at Harvard, Dad (Nicholas Campbell) admits his inability to support her. She is meanwhile locked into a codependency with her embittered mother (Jessica Lange), who can't stop kvetching about the sacrifices she has made on her daughter's behalf; their relationship is a milder version of that between movie star Frances Farmer (Lange) and her mother (Kim Stanley) in Frances (1982).

Lizzie tries to replicate her dysfunctional parental relationships with Ruby, who finally refuses to help her (and thereby does), and Rafe (Jason Biggs), the too-good-to-be-true boyfriend whose patience she exhausts. Although Skjoldbjaerg stylizes Lizzie's collapse by deploying time-lapse photography and jump cuts (as used by Woody Allen in depicting Charlotte Rampling's breakdown in 1980's Stardust Memories), this can't save a film that flicks a switch to resolve its crisis: When things get really bad for Lizzie, Anne Heche, smugly omniscient as a college psychotherapist, is on hand to dispense the platitudes and Prozac that turn Wurtzel into a best-selling author.

In Me Without You, Marina's absentee dad (Nicky Henson) is a philandering airline pilot who occasionally turns up to address his preadolescent daughter as "my sexy princess"; by the time she's a punkette, she's given to flashing her panties at him when he enters a room. Her Electra complex in place, Marina competes with the phantoms of her once glamorous mom (Trudie Styler) and her father's mistress by casting herself as a sexually idealized "other woman" and loyal Holly as "the deserted wife." She seduces all of Holly's boyfriends, including a feckless married lecturer (Kyle MacLachlan), but ultimately has no means of frustrating the unspoken love between her brother (Oliver Milburn) and Holly.

Goldbacher superbly meshes Holly's 20-year liberation from her middle-class Jewish background with her liberation from Marina's emotional thrall. A coda set in the present suggests that, in Marina's case, her sins will be visited on her own daughter, and that Marina did not avail herself of a shrink played by Anne Heche, but that is something for which she might be grateful.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.

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