Review: Spork

J.B. Ghuman Jr.’s Spork imagines what might happen if Juno’s twee misfit had been born with two sexual organs instead of one and lived in a trailer park with a deadbeat dad. The dad even seems to suggest as much when he asks his daughter (named Spork, natch), “Are you pregnant?” and then, “Did you get someone else pregnant?” Spork (Savannah Stehlin) is such an outcast that her only real friend is a neighbor in the next-door trailer, a sassy black girl named Tootsie Roll with moves like Willow Smith (the movie’s sense of goodwill is such that it can’t construe how this might be racially offensive). At school, she’s taunted by a group of über-WASP blond girls who track her and Tootsie down to a nightclub (how they get in is unclear), where she gets her first real taste of the dance floor. So to enact her revenge on the blond bitches, she enlists Tootsie Roll to help her win the annual school dance competition. The only real problem: Spork is a white girl who can’t dance.

She’s not the only one with genetic obstacles to overcome. Spork’s love interest is a waifish kid with two gay dads who insists he’s straight—basically, an icon of this generation’s nontraditional gender norms. But if Spork never feels authentically out-there, it’s because it still more or less toes the line of every teen comedy from Welcome to the Dollhouse to Mean Girls. Spork wins over the crowd not by learning to dance, of course, but by turning her love of Twister into its own kind of weird rhythmic performance. See, it’s cool to be different! And here’s the thing: Underneath the shtick and alternative anatomy, Spork is actually cute, unlike Dawn Wiener, and you can imagine her growing into a relatively well-adjusted human being, rather than a down-and-out prostitute. The movie may not have Todd Solondz’s bite, but at least it has hope.