‘White Girl’ Review: Sundance Heroin Drama Goes Only Skin-Deep

Morgan Saylor (“Homeland”) stars as a privlleged college student who gets mixed up in drugs, but the movie hasn’t much to say about that

Leah (Morgan Saylor, “Homeland”), the protagonist of Elizabeth Wood’s first feature, “White Girl,” is a 19-year-old college student screwing and snorting her way through her first college summer in New York City.

The magazine’s editor (Justin Bartha) invites her into his office, lays out a couple of lines on his desk, and less than a minute later, they’re having sex.

Sure, it’s a little awkward when she brings three street dealers to her fancy office party, and they’re instantly noticeable because they’re practically the only people of color in the place, but then they start selling, and friendship is doled out by the gram.

[...] Blue gets picked up by the cops, and suddenly Leah, who’s still holding Blue’s drugs, needs to make a lot of money, fast, to pay for his legal defense.

The closest thing Wood has to a contemporary angle is the movie’s self-awareness about its protagonist’s race.

The movie’s awareness — and, I suppose, writer-director Wood’s, since it’s inspired by her own experiences — is commendable as far as it goes, but it never blossoms into actual analysis, nor does it prevent Wood from making her lily-white proxy the story’s center and its only three-dimensional character.

The movie’s Sundance contemporary “The 4th,” in which an aimless white hipster bikes around Los Angeles annoying people with his problems, was more daring in its use of an unsympathetic protagonist, but apparently lacked enough bathroom three-ways to garner the equivalent buzz.

Wood and cinematographer Michael Simmonds (“The Lunchbox”) are at their best when they’re capturing Leah’s state of mind in the midst of a bender, cranking the droning electronic score and shifting to a deep scarlet palette that makes it look like she’s drowning in blood.