A waste of wasted youth.

Thirteen Directed by Catherine Hardwicke Six years ago a modest, authentic film about a young girl entering puberty made an unexpectedly sane argument for her emotional independence-her need to be by herself before assuming the frivolous obligations of adolescence and incipient sexuality. It was titled Thirteen, by Virginia filmmaker David D. Williams, who wove his film around the documentary fact of his teenage protagonist, Wilhamenia Dickens, who played resourceful, introspective Nina.

It's depressing to think that Williams' movie-one of the loveliest, truly "independent" films of the recent past (its only local showcase was at the Film Society of Lincoln Center)-will be lost in the trendy acclaim for a newer movie. Also called Thirteen, it is a noisy, flashy, sensationalized refutation of the personal truth Williams and Miss Dickens confessed.

This unlucky Thirteen, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, is a mall-friendly version of Larry Clark's teen-sexploitation. No crotch shots, but Hardwicke is devoted to showing how naughty and wild today's youth are. She's down with indiscreet teen discretionary-consumption, following Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) on her self-destructive quest to fit in-the sentimental alibi for all teen problems, which Hardwicke pins to standard feminist complaint. Hardwicke is an adult, but the script was co-written with 13-year-old Nikki Reed, who also plays Evie, the story's idol/bad influence. Infatuated by Reed's spunk, Hardwicke accepts the self-pitying script. Blame Mom (co-producer Holly Hunter), blame Dad (D. W. Moffat), blame the Black and Latino kids who coerce Tracy into drugs, sex, carousing and profanity. What a step back from Williams' film, which proved the blessing of cross-cultural empathy.

Hardwicke's white-girl protagonists don't pose Williams' challenge. They're market-tested-guaranteed to sell rather than reveal any integrity or confusion that all teens have in common. Hardwicke uses shaky-cam and colored filters to liven up a circumstance that is never looked at plainly. Such showy technique, expressing nothing, has become pervasive. It's as distracting and empty as wind chimes or an MTV broadcast. This Thirteen is actually less convincing than the soap-operatic White Oleander. The only difference is Tracy and Evie's tongue-studs on which Hardwicke zooms-in close so you won't miss her bad-girl style. Surely the culture misleads Tracy and Evie, but so does Hardwicke.

When a piece of mainstream trash like this wins acclaim on the indie circuit, it has little to do with exploring a social issue and more to do with giving the cognoscenti a flattering fantasy.

Open Range Directed by Kevin Costner The habit of moviegoing has never before been so joyless or unrewarding. If the moviegoing ritual has been reduced to a reaction to advertising rather than a need to reflect upon a story or a vision, it's because the industry has forsaken its commitment to address the public imaginatively. Jumping on the anti-Gigli bandwagon won't bring back moral imperative or good taste. That media-driven derision was as devoid of humanity as those passengerless cars and trucks flipping and crashing in any one of the summer's innumerable highway-chase sequences that all blur into one continuous, crazy/affectless demolition derby.

Welcome, now, to the Kevin Costner repair shop, also known as Open Range-a deliberate confrontation with the zeitgeist. Costner replaces our popular dystopian big-screen environments with a clear, vast, natural one. This revived western was actually shot in Alberta, Canada, but feels more like a paradise of the imagination. Costner means to summon western movie memories, yet the beauty captured by cinematographer James Muro isn't merely scenic but a generic trope based on-justified by-the true grandeur of nature. (Anyone who says that they didn't sigh at Open Range's vistas-or didn't fall in love with the look of this movie ten minutes into it is either a liar or blind.) Costner's vision recalls that moment in Lawrence of Arabia when T.E. Lawrence says he likes the desert because "it's clean."

As its title suggests, Open Range aims to restore a sense of possibility, so movies can once again be a meaningful form of popular culture, not just "dirty" and assaultive. The film is keyed to experience as represented in a once-popular genre. (Costner seeks an art form that, like the land, is unsullied, still fertile.) Open Range has what westerns as uncelebrated as The Tin Star or The Tall T had that, when rewatched in adulthood, still makes them relevant to our lives, and not just boyhood fantasies. After directing two films inspired by westerns, this is Costner's first use of the genre that fits in to the contemporary social moment.

Boss (Robert Duvall) and Charley (Costner) aren't simple heroic figures taming the west; they're interlopers in the business of westernization-"free-grazing" a herd of cattle through territory already claimed by expansionist entrepreneurs. Their intrepidness identifies them as Americans. A team, but also workers, the two men show different kinds of determination, impatience, defensiveness and, occasionally, humor. In their battle against a land baron (Michael Gambon) and his corrupt stooge sheriff (James Russo), Boss and Charley are just less wrong. When they claim their freedom to graze, to choose their destiny against an arbitrary authority, their motives are unromanticized.

It's a proper approach to historical fiction, since it accepts as classical the genre's determinism and ambivalence known from the modernists Kurosawa, Peckinpah and Leone. Earlier this year, Reggie Rock Bythewood tried reworking Red River in Biker Boyz, but audiences were bewildered by seeing the grand, old masculine/community conflicts transferred to a modern setting. They couldn't respond to Bythewood's admittedly quirky refinement of American male dilemma. This signaled a major cultural disconnect. From the eager way media shills analyzed The Matrix Reloaded as a futuristic parable (after refusing to so examine Minority Report), it was clear that the mechanism for instruction and ritual had broken down. Contemporary genre films merely obscure moral and political issues. Ideas get swamped by nihilistic fashion, cgi-novelty and techno/anthro-babble. (Worst joke of the summer was the "lesson" people inferred from the formulaic fish-bowl movie Finding Nemo.)

Weekly entertainment magazines distort this trend by flaunting it as cultural triumph. No wonder Costner returns to the western-for clarity. His desire, like T.E. Lawrence's, speaks more powerfully and quizzically than mere nostalgia; Open Range's aerated vision distills the western's dynamics in order to answer cultural confusion. Wags will complain about conventional motifs-grizzled vets on their last go-round, the Latino hire who becomes a pawn, the lone, desirous woman Sue (Annette Bening), the shoot-out in the center of town, etc. But noticing these motifs is only half a response. Costner admires the western's classicism for its pure dramatization of man's social and moral struggle-not the "winning-of-the-west," but the development of national character.

I propose that Costner's familiar and alluring rituals contain the fondness and perspective that Scorsese wanted but failed to convey in Gangs of New York. "It's more of an opera than history," Marty explained, but there was too much macho strutting and ethnic partisanship in his tall tale. Gangs' fractiousness was modish (though never becoming truly popular); it exploited our era's confusion in the same sense that every hip director thinks doing snazzy violence is doing "a Scorsese." He presented aberrant patriotism as the essence of American (urban) psychology. Open Range's archetypal characters are beautifully, simply psychological and historical. I imagine Scorsese is movie-lover enough to recognize how the less-skilled Costner expresses modern American complexities mythically-the luck of naivete.

Costner isn't interested in idealizing American history or apologizing for the "settlers" incursions. He takes for granted a sense of perfidy and competition in American history (as John Ford did when sardonically referring to "the blessings of civilization" at the end of Stagecoach). Boss and Charley are flawed men, deep in moral crisis like the characters in 3000 Miles to Graceland and Thirteen Days. Open Range redresses 70s revisionist westerns by its lack of cynicism; it belongs to the same subcult of Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand from which it copies forlorn lap-dissolves. Every scene plays with an unusual rejection of political disgust. Even when it's hackneyed, it's hopeful.

Those who scoff at Costner's compendium of generic tropes more quickly than they berate the cliches of Terminator 3, Bad Boys II and S.W.A.T. will miss Costner's revivification: It's in the way Boss and Charley's showdown in the woods with a gang of badmen hearkens back to the tensions of Seven Samurai; how the futile retaliation revisited upon their camp recalls Unforgiven's sense of social chaos; how the townspeople's witnessing of Boss and Charley's showdown-operatically extended into a communal dialectic-improves on High Noon.

Can't call Open Range a masterpiece. Costner's command of craft gets wobbly (during the shootout, too many shifted perspectives loosen the center of the action). But after immersing us in a freshly envisioned world, he gets the crucial things right: Alarm at violence comes through his recording of gunshots-definite, resolute as they were in George Stevens' Shane. This shock effect is unexpected from a mainstream movie when the larger industry pretends we're still in peace time. Open Range reconnects with the stunning cost of violence, death, politics, personal commitment (ideas people refused to heed in Saving Private Ryan). This realization undergirds the carefully gauged performances. This is Duvall's 2000th Boss, but he's real good at it, just shy of grandiose. Costner takes the backseat again with authority and modesty. A close-up where Charley thinks "about who I am" is perfectly personal, vocally and visually coarse and tender. Bening's Sue is just as earnest, making stock female strength seem fresh; her beseeching of Charley becomes the film's cri de coeur. They all have a simplicity and guilelessness you want to believe.

Not a single scene in Open Range is "original," yet it all comes directly from our cultural (human) heritage, and that, Costner realizes, is what modern movies have lost. Going to the hits this summer has been dispiriting because they don't connect to our basic virtues. (Bad Boys II and S.W.A.T. deny that we have any.) Can Costner lure the degraded youth audience? Will they permit him to remind them of their humanity-the way good pop can and used to? Or will Costner's brave, noble effort be like playing the Hollies' "The Air that I Breathe" for music fiends who think Radiohead is fresh?