Fanning the flames in a coming-of-age drama

SURELY, one sign that Elle Fanning, still just 14, has come of age is that she's cornered the market on coming-of-age-movies: "Super 8," "We Bought a Zoo," "Somewhere." And now, "Ginger and Rosa," a movie that bears some resemblance to the latter, Sofia Coppola's impressionist portrait of a girl trying desperately to get the attention of a disinterested and famous father.

Here, Fanning stars in a period piece (the '60s) about an English girl in similar straits - her celebrity radical dad (Alessandro Nivola) is a man whose public morality (he's a peace activist) seems to have stolen energy from his private morality.

This puts a strain on his marriage (to Christina Hendricks), leading to an estrangement that makes daughter Ginger (Fanning) all the more eager for his attention and love.

She finds some consolation in her intense friendship with Rosa (Alice Englert), and the way that director Sally Potter captures the intimacy of this relationship accounts for the movie's strongest moments. I don't remember anything this vivid since Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures," which also implied that there is something dangerous in this profound attachment.

Even when "Ginger and Rosa" is presenting benign, tranquil portraits of teen girls at play or at rest, there is a sense of growing instability - Ginger feels it, and pours her anxiety into the energy of activism, joining an anti-nuke movement.

Adding to the contrast is the gorgeous surface of the film created by Potter, most famous for "Orlando," another movie with a large bounty of impressive compositions (she does interesting things here in low light with embers, a cigarette, the color of Fanning's flame-red hair).

The movie looks better than some of the dialogue reads, and some of the ancillary characters (Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt, Annette Bening) feel like they should have more to do. Fanning, though, is a natural, and Nivola finds the right note of destructive narcissism underneath his character's surface charm.