Towelhead, the film directorial debut of Alan Ball, is just as provocative and disquieting as his previous work (he wrote American Beauty and created HBO's Six Feet Under and True Blood). It may even be more unsettling. Right from the opening scene, in which a man helps his 13-year-old stepdaughter with a bit of personal hygiene he has no business whatsoever conducting, the movie rattles you, makes you squirm in your seat.

Ball is an expert at giving dead-serious subject matter a subtle, darkly comical spin: There's nothing overtly funny about that opening scene whatsoever, but you find yourself smiling -- or suppressing a smile -- a scene or two later, when the exasperated mother (Maria Bello) of the girl, Jasira (played by newcomer Summer Bishil), packs her up and sends her to live with her Lebanese father Rifat (Peter Macdissi) in the Houston suburbs.

The humor in Towelhead -- and this is, at times, a very funny movie -- comes not from the plot of the story, which Ball adapted from the novel by Alicia Erian, but from the characters' reactions to what's transpiring in front of their faces. This is a tale about a lonely girl's sexual awakening and subsequent abuse by her neighbor (Aaron Eckhart), and Ball never plays any of this material for cheap laughs. Unlike Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling), who specializes in mining thorny subject matter for comedy, Ball respects his characters -- even the rotten ones -- as human beings who, no matter their flaws, are deserving of sympathy.

It's Ball's complex and frank approach to subject matter normally depicted in black-and-white terms that distinguishes Towelhead from so many coming-of-age dramas before it. Rifat, for example, is a short-tempered and demanding man, prone to violently slapping Jasira at the slightest provocation. In any other movie, you'd automatically hate him. But Macdissi plays him with a prissy, fussy demeanor that gives his line reading a humorous undertone. Rifat is also an American success story, working for NASA and providing the best way he knows how for his daughter.

He is also, of course, the victim of quiet, polite racism -- the kind that permeates suburban tracts -- and although he can't ever properly express it in words, the movie makes us understand that his disciplinarian tactics are his way of preparing his daughter for the big bad world awaiting her.

The irony in Towelhead is that that world is already affecting her. While babysitting the little boy next door, Jasira discovers a stash of his dad's porn magazines and, in the process, discovers her own sexuality. That self-awareness -- along with the fact that Jasira happens to be beautiful -- seduces Mr. Vuoso (Eckhart), a husband, father and Army reservist soon to be deployed to Kuwait (the movie is set during the first Gulf War).

Ball takes great care to show how his subsequent behavior toward Jasira, as heinous as it is, comes from a place he confuses as genuine love. And the girl, starved of any real emotional connections and bewildered by this new aspect of life she has encountered, mistakes sexual abuse for something deeper and more profound.

This is fiendishly tricky territory for a movie to navigate, and Towelhead doesn't stop there (Jasira also embarks on a sexual relationship with a boy at her school). The fact that Bishil, who was 18 at the time of filming, looks so young makes some of the scenes in Towelhead difficult to watch, too. Although Ball is never exploitative (there's little nudity in the film, none of it from Bishil), he doesn't shy away from showing us what the story needs in order to make its point. An unusually eloquent and harrowing look at adolescence from a female perspective, Towelhead also argues that it is possible to not only survive traumatic experiences, but also learn and then transcend them. The movie puts Jasira -- and the audience -- through the wringer, but it also makes the ride worth it.

Cast: Summer Bishil, Peter Macdissi, Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, Eugene Jones.

Writer-director: Alan Ball. Based on the novel by Alicia Erian.

Producers: Alan Ball, Ted Hope.

A Warner Independent Pictures release. Running time: 122 minutes. Vulgar language, sexual situations, nudity, strong adult themes. In Miami-Dade only: Regal South Beach.

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