Writer-director Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides's novel) is a disarmingly wispy film given its subject matter, which is pretty much spelled out by its title. Coppola's treatment of the '70s-set story of five—that's right, five, for God's sake—doomed teen sisters and the boys who love them is a loving but uneven debut. Nevertheless, the young director seems to have found her metier here. The titular virgins—played by Leslie Hayman, A.J. Cook, Chelse Swain, Hanna Hall, and Kirsten Dunst—are blessed with great luminosity (Dunst's character is actually named Lux) and cursed with a mother (Kathleen Turner) who'd go to any lengths to snuff it out. Their dad (James Woods, who's pretty good in a rare non-maniac role), a teacher at their high school, sheepishly tries to bridge the chasm between his household's repression and the realm of freedom offered by the various boys (the dreamiest of whom is portrayed by the exemplarily dreamy Josh Hartnett) who want to, um, date his daughters. Things don't quite work out, obviously.

Coppola's stylistic gambit here is to wrench a certain skewed poignancy out of '70s kitsch. She throws in shots of sunlight pouring through trees (complete with camera flares) that are dead ringers for the pictures that came with the frames one's parents used to pick up at Spencer Gifts back in the day. She often shoots Dunst in a way that echoes the big-in-the-'70s soft-core photography of David Hamilton. When she puts a '70s song on the soundtrack she lets you hear the needle hitting the vinyl first, even if there's no record player in the scene. Most of this works like a charm—I got a lump in my throat during the corsage—pinning scene. And some of it doesn't—she tends to rely too much on voice-over narration, though that's a trap even the masters can fall into (e.g., Scorsese with The Age of Innocence). But, overall, she makes the wispiness not only signify, but feel just right.