Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger is an awkwardly charming coming-of-age story about a docile young dweeb who mixes with the cool kids, becomes an overnight badass, then gets seduced by the dark side of being popular.

Initially our eponymous 14-year-old anti-hero rebels in ways that maintain a degree of dorky caution: instead of smoking, Esther lies and says she’s trying to quit. Instead of wagging school, she skips one school and secretly attends another.

As our bookish little lady’s story progresses, the morals and life lessons espoused by writer/director Cathy Randall get heavier. The film’s title insinuates a kind of goofy naivety that suits the story and how it’s handled, but suggests nothing of Randall’s serious dramatic undertones, designed to push the early teen demographic well out of SpongeBob territory and into something more tangible and real. Randall deserves kudos for treating her audience like mature viewers when they may in fact want to be treated like dummies.

The story mostly hovers around the relationship between Esther and Sunni (Keisha Castle-Hughes), a cool-kid-with-a-conscience who has an even cooler mum Mary (Toni Collette). Sunni and Mary live in a small apartment and Mary earns her keep as a pole dancer; their life greatly contrasts Esther’s upper-class Jewish heritage and the film draws numerous comparisons. Esther stops going to her private school - where she is lonely and bullied - and puts on Sunni’s old uniform and goes to her (public) school instead, where she reinvents herself as a sassy, popular personality.

An early scene indicates the director’s willingness to turn something cute and fuzzy into a cautionary device for the grim realities of ‘real’ life. Blueburger befriends a duckling and lovingly walks around with it in tow, but not long later she’s in science class holding a scalpel - and guess which creatures the students dissect? Apparently cutting open the stomaches of dead ducklings is par for the course in private schools in Adelaide. It’s a ripe warning that Randall is prepared to pluck heart strings.

Mostly, however, Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger has a bumbling charm and giggly appeal the youngsters will appreciate, though Randall strikes an at times awkward balance between comedy and drama. At its worst Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger isn’t funny, doesn’t resonate dramatically and feels awfully contrived. There is a scene in which Esther and her brother, alone at the dinner table, dunk their dinner onto their heads and sarcastically chat about each other’s day. The characters are putting on obscene caricatures of their parents; the scene is transparent, self-knowingly witty and borderline unbelievable. A joke that looks good on paper doesn’t necessarily gel with the finished produced and the interior reality of the story. Randall doesn’t quite get this balance right.

Danielle Catanzariti performs well in a demanding central role, but like Esther’s friends and family, and even like Esther herself, the audience will struggle to get a grip on her personality. She’s an unpredictable character and often aloof from the audience’s sympathies. Keisha Castle-Hughes, star of Whale Rider, cuts an appealing presence as Sunni.

Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger is intriguing imperfect; a gawky, hit-and-miss growing up story mostly stripped of gloss and sentiment. With any luck the goofy title will appeal to the wrong audience, and pipsqueaks who wanted green sludge and fart jokes will have to sit through something considerably more sophisticated.

Review by Luke Buckmaster

Director: Cathy Randall
Screenplay: Cathy Randall
Cast: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Danielle Catanzariti, Toni Collette, Essie Davis, Russell Dykstra, Christian Byers, Jonny Pasvolsky
Cinematography: Anna Howard
Running time: 103 minutes
Australian theatrical release: March 20, 2008

Watch the Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger trailer: