FROM writer/director Sofia Coppola comes this salutary message movie with a linear plot drawn from real-life in a “Vanity Fair” magazine article.

In 2008/9, four adolescent women and one man systematically burgled the homes of Los Angeles’s rich and famous (notably Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom and Lindsay Lohan), carrying away famous-label clothes, cash, drugs and at least one firearm. Their parents were unaware of how they were comporting their after-dark lives.

They got away with it for a while, insouciant of risks, getting buzzes from undetected law-breaking, proximity to celebrities without direct interaction, or flaunting stolen fashion garments (with little to commend them in style or attractiveness) to peer admiration on dance floors and at parties. Eventually uncompromising police action delivered the come-uppance, felt equally by adult family members apparently so deeply immersed in their own lives that they were totally unaware of what the little darlings were up to.

The film doesn’t offer sugar-coated clichés such as mark many Hollywood films observing the same social milieu. The kids are foul-mouthed drug users with limited vocabulary, morally sterile, cowardly, very hard to admire. Their victims who appear only peripherally may also have little to commend themselves beyond being notable for being famous for being notable… And sloppy security arrangements in their homes kept a cynic like me wondering.

The film’s emotional baggage contains little perceptible love. Or, surprisingly among beautiful young people at peak hormonal stages, sexual passion. Did Coppola see those themes as distractions from her core intention for the film? She invites us to conjecture about that while delivering moderate measures of both entertainment and satisfaction from her refusal to compromise about grubby behaviour blighting some young lives.

At Palace Electric