Now Whip It / Into Shape / Shape It Up

Whip It is a sports movie for women, by women, starring women. It’s more sexy than it is macho and for that I’m not sure how a strident feminist would react to it, although I’d hope they approve because Whip It could be an empowering movie for women stuck in the daily grind of womanhood. After all, men aren’t the only athletes who want to bash in an opponent's nasal cavity with an elbow.

The sport is women’s roller derby. Decades ago male and female versions were injected into pop culture as legitimate sporting events. They never really took off. In the last decade, though, a revival has popped up in major cities across the country. More sideshow novelty than sport — matches are often held in gutted warehouses — women’s roller derby was reinvented for the hellbilly, tongue-in-cheek hipster crowd. And that’s how it’s presented here: as a busty tattooed subculture for the ironic and cynical.

Texas beauty pageant contestant Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page) discovers the sport in a head shop, where her mom admires a display of bongs and blurts out, “Oh, what pretty vases you have here.” Lying to her parents, Bliss says she’s going to an SAT class, but instead hops on the senior citizen BINGO bus to Austin, the hub of Texas’ underground roller derby league. It’s there she watches her first match and falls in love — partly with the sport, mostly with the rebellious spirit that pumps through the rowdy players’ veins.

After the match, she meets members of one of the teams, the Hurl Scouts, and they convince her to come to tryouts to which she says, “The last time I wore skates they had Barbies on them.” But the derby girls — with stage names such as Smashley Simpson, Rosa Sparks, Bloody Holly, Maggie Mayhem and Princess Slaya — convince her to try out anyway, though 17-year-old Bliss tells another lie, that she’s 22 years old for the adults-only league.

Of course Bliss makes the team. Of course she helps the pathetic Hurl Scouts climb from the cellar to the top of their division. Of course her age is revealed before the championship match, moments before her disapproving mother wanders in late to have her quiet and proud moment in the back of the crowd. Whip It is not short of cliché. Nor is it shy about even hiding them. But honestly, who cares? Whip It is a deliriously fun movie, one of the most energetic and sincere of the year. And it may use cliché to its occasional detriment, but the film is still a complete original.

What a wonderful and cohesive cast, too. Ellen Page, still sparkling from Juno, is a treasure. She’s thrown up against some big personalities here — including SNL genius Kristen Wiig, singer Eve, stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Death Proof) and a hilarious Andrew Wilson, brother to Owen — yet Page never flinches, never misses a beat, and still acts the daylights out of her co-stars. She’s even given her own catchphrase on the derby track after a long pause and a slow camera zoom: “Let’s. Go. Apeshit.” she says, looking as menacing as her petite frame will let her. There’s also an electric performance by Juliette Lewis, basically playing a nuttier version of herself as derby villain Iron Maven, and another by Drew Barrymore, who seems to get grotesquely injured in every scene.

Barrymore, a staple in Hollywood since her big breakthrough in E.T. in 1982, directs Whip It like maybe she’s been paying attention all these years on movie sets. Her film — from a Shauna Cross screenplay and book — is so much more than a sport movie; it’s a coming-of-age story more delicate than all the flying elbows and knuckle sandwiches will let you believe. It’s really about Bliss being honest with her parents (played by Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern), who don’t see the innocent cuteness in the derby antics.

At times Barrymore mounts the camera on a set of skates and takes off down the banked track capturing handheld images of bloody fists, scabbed kneecaps and mini-skirted derby brawlers. And then, on a dime, she can turn around to allow tender moments for Bliss to cry in reflection at the places her lies have taken her, or not taken her. At one point, Bliss gets a boyfriend, but Barrymore doesn’t let Whip It become some kind of inane romantic comedy. And yet there’s a lovely scene in a swimming pool that is probably one of the sexiest non-sex scenes filmed in some time.

Barrymore also has an ingenious way of describing the rules of roller derby: she has Wilson sketch them out on a white board in pictures so simple that the scene ends with the drawing of a smiley face. If only, as a favor to me, she could use the same method to now describe cricket, a sport that needs some simplification.

I enjoyed Whip It tremendously. The film reinforced one belief (Ellen Page is marvelous) and laid the foundation for another (Drew Barrymore as talented director). And if you’re like me, after seeing Whip It you’ll be searching the Internet for the nearest roller derby match.