Roller derby, that knockabout contact sport on skates, animated by swinging gibes and jabbing elbows, is women's lippy reply to hockey. With punny stage names such as Jaba the Slut, Bloody Holly and Eva Destruction, rollergirls, as they're called, take on character roles worthy of professional wrestling and act the parts with snarling relish. Their skirts are tiny, their fishnets torn, their eyeliner thick. Bruises blend with the girls' abundant tattoos, creating their own artistic statement — big, bad badges of honor.
Several years ago roller derby enjoyed a kind of renaissance in Austin, where it thrives to this day. In "Whip It," a small-town teenager ("Juno's" Ellen Page) from fictional Bodeen, Texas, discovers roller derby in nearby Austin and immediately wants a piece of the action. Depicted here, it's an unlikely leap that plays as a shallow fairy tale of teen emancipation — not a statement of emboldened femininity — and the movie seems strangely uninterested in beetling into the sport's gnarly subculture of pugnacious athletes and party-hearty fans.
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A soft, ingratiatingly commercial effort, "Whip It" is stunningly square for a comedy about such a rambunctious, hipster-driven sport. Its portrayal of roller derby has a canned texture, hewing tightly to its PG-13 sensibility, in which the roughest things we see are a nose bloodied by a well-aimed elbow and scrunched tough-gal glares that look lifted from a community theater production of "West Side Story."
The film was written by former Austin-based rollergirl Shauna Cross, adapted from her novel "Derby Girl," and directed by Drew Barrymore in her feature directorial debut. Both display a sort of fan-girl admiration for the sport yet are more interested in telling the ultra-formulaic story about Page's mousy Bliss Cavendar and her not-very-persuasive transformation from bored beauty pageant contestant to rowdy roller girl.
It all happens too easily, as Bliss grabs a roller derby flier from an Austin thrift shop, attends one of the bouts and all of a sudden has a passion for the game. "Why don't you and I try out?" Bliss asks her best friend after their first derby. Cue — and the movie shamelessly does — the Ramones' "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker." This sequence, like others, has an unfortunate ABC Family Channel vibe.
She has doubts, the diminutive, down-home Bliss, but one of the roller babes, played by a vaguely miscast Kristin Wiig, tells her, without laughing, "Put your skates on and be your own hero." Next we see Bliss dusting off her childhood Barbie skates and trying out for the league.
Faking her age — she's 17, but the itty-bitty-for-her-age girl somehow passes for 22 — Bliss joins the Hurl Scouts, whose team members dress in mock Girl Scout uniforms as punky burlesque and include Barrymore's Smashley Simpson, Wiig's Maggie Mayhem and hip-hop singer Eve's Rosa Sparks. On the rival team is Juliette Lewis' Iron Maven, all swagger and snarl, and hasn't the willfully edgy Lewis always seemed like a closet roller girl?
Enough people find roller derby sexy-scary, but for some of us it just looks like mouthy Goth tomboys gone wild, strutting about in a form of trampy theater. "Whip It" embraces this perception without dislodging it, never illuminating it much further than showing that the girls have normal day jobs and some are even moms. (Yet they all love to yell and pump their fists and incite the occasional food fight.)
The always good Page, sapped of her "Juno" sass, is the one-dimensional focus here, while her teammates remain sketchily drawn bit parts, with Barrymore and Eve in particular feeling like extended cameos. Wiig, with pink hair and fake tats, gets more screen time as a kind of Scout mom to Bliss, whose home life with her narrow-minded parents (Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern) is reduced to hackneyed teen-rebellion tics and tantrums.
Though set mostly in Austin, "Whip It" was infamously shot in Michigan, thanks to stronger tax incentives for filmmakers. The crew came to Austin for a few pick-up scenes, so there are the obligatory shots of South Congress Avenue, Sixth Street and the Alamo Drafthouse, plus some name-checking of Waterloo Records and Lovejoy's bar.
But even those bits can't shake the plastic lifelessness of this coming-of-age sports comedy. For the real deal, check out Austin filmmaker Bob Ray's documentary about Texas rollergirls, "Hell on Wheels," which brings on the blood and brawn with verite velocity and without wimpy commercial considerations.
