Reviewed - Pretty Persuasion: Featuring characters who are morally bankrupt or weak and sprinkled with dialogue that turns crude and racist, Pretty Persuasion is a calculatedly provocative social satire that is rooted in cynicism.

However, when the plot turns on a sexual harassment case brought by three teenage girls against a teacher, the movie seems quite tame compared to the much more extreme and disturbing execution of a similar storyline in the current Hard Candy.

Both films are anchored in the admirably unflinching performances of the remarkable young women cast as their clever, determined protagonists - Ellen Page in Hard Candy, and now Evan Rachel Wood in Pretty Persuasion. Wood plays the 15-year-old Kimberly, a sexually experienced and promiscuous student at a private Beverly Hills school. In the opening scene, she auditions for the role of a seductive French maid in a TV series titled Dysfunction, which is hardly a challenge for a habitual, manipulative liar whose whole young life is a performance.

This is one of those movies - in a line from Heathers, Election and Mean Girls - where adults are far removed from the realities of their offspring's behaviour. Kimberly's father (a scenery-chewing James Woods) is a foul-mouthed, cocaine-snorting businessman who's on his third marriage. Her mother sends her a birthday card in which she misspells Kimberly's name, and gets her age and the name of her dog wrong.

Kimberly's best friends are girls to whom she can feel smugly superior: a shy new Middle Eastern student and a Canadian who confuses podiatrists with paedophiles and says her boyfriend is "like a poet" because he speaks in "iambic pentagrams". When Kimberly instigates the sexual harassment case the three girls take against a teacher, it proves not be quite as clear-cut a set-up as it seems, given what we learn about the teacher's own sexual proclivities.

Throwing references to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and a repeated tasteless joke about Arab sexual practices into this festering pot, and introducing an ambitious lesbian TV reporter (Jane Krakowski), first-time director Marcos Siega, a music videos veteran, and screenwriter Skander Halim ultimately overload their movie with issues baggage. And while some of the humour is razor-sharp, some other lines feel obvious and fall flat.

What sustains the movie is Wood, who is on-screen throughout and follows her striking performances in Thirteen and Down in the Valley with an impeccable incarnation of a modern screen bitch.