The skyline across the Hudson and golden-door Mother of Exiles statue are not overdone but subdued the couple of times they appear in On the Outs; they are only a vague dream of another, unattainable world. The neon glows of Times Square wind up inside a game room, when one of the three heroines escapes one evening with her retarded brother, isolated moments that end in sorrow; and that same girl-woman’s final scenes, her grim gesture of hope at that very river shore, ring not quite so true for all that.

Nearby, pricey Glen Ridge has been the manicured locale for two recent studio films, and once down-at-heels Hoboken is gentrified expensive. South of the latter’s waterfront Frank Sinatra Drive, Jersey City, too, has its view of Oz island yet remains urban ruins passed over in State tourist handouts. It lacks even the chic notoriety of Bloods and Crips, gangs co-director/-producer Michael Skolnik was researching in, of all places, Little Rock, where at 2 am he saw a facially scarred girlchild dealing drugs while simultaneously watching her own four-year-old. The experience stayed, and soon he was discussing a project about inner-city girls with screenwriter/co-director/-producer Lori Silverbush and actress/”co-creator” Paola Mendoza.

Shot in twenty-four days in autumn 2003, the result of the eighteen-month collaboration among these three inner-city-activist filmmakers, some others in the industry, young women in a juvenile detention center in Secaucus, and local actors and residents of Jersey City’s toughest blocks, is On the Outs. Not the fashionable silliness of a “based on,” this group effort is a powerful blending of three independent yet crossing stories from the wasted dead ends of life.

At the intimate Cornerstone Promotion screening and Q&A, the filmmakers, joined by Mendoza and her co-stars Judy Marte from the Lower East Side and, in her début, South Bronx high school student and self-admitted “rookie,” Anny Mariano, defined this as “something different, this story that needs to be told.” Needs telling in the sense that the theme, if you will, has been done often enough, but invariably from the point of view of male protagonists, not the girls’.

Also present was Demetrius “Hook” Mitchell, the Oakland basketball legend whose jail-truncated career is the subject of Hooked, co-directed and –produced by Skolnik, and who pointed to a lack of acknowledgement and guidance among ghetto youngsters. So desperate are these girls, observed Silverbush, that, to their ruin, the first guy who shows the slightest interest “unfortunately owns them.”

The loose script, developed through workshops and videotaped improvisations among actors, detention center girls and the film’s “creators,” uses three composite lives that can serve as patterns of numberless others in the vicious circle of marginalization, cultural and educational deprivation, fatherless children, violence, incarceration and often early death.

Youngest is fifteen-year-old Suzette (Mariano), sheltered from the streets by her single mother Frances Williams (Kamilah Forbes) and expected to be a good student and look after little sister Regan. Then there is Keisha “Oz” Osbourne (Marte), a tough corn-rowed seventeen-year-old drug dealer with her own corner and male assistants, living with Grandma (Gloria Zelaya) and “former” addict mom Evelyn (Ana “Rok” García), and devoted to her retarded asthmatic brother Chuey (Dominc Colón). Looking older and hollow-faced at the same age, emotionally and physically fragile Marisol (Mendoza) dotes on her daughter Autumn (Autumn Collier, subject of Mendoza’s co-directorial Autumn’s Eyes), lives off her aunt’s disability payments, and refuses to recognize herself for the stone crackhead that she is. Though they never are more than acquaintances, they intersect naturally, on mean neighborhood streets and in detention, and a frustrated Oz will take out anger at her mother’s and Marisol’s relapses by pummeling the latter.

Tall, handsome and soft-voiced Terrell (Clarence "Don" Hutchinson) sweet-talks Suzette off her feet, not merely because she is vulnerably innocent but also because superficially he does appear the answer to a girl’s dreams. The fake charmer soon stands unveiled for the drug dealer, egotistical womanizer and dangerous macho posturer he is; the adoring girl’s pregnancy and abortion (arranged by her mother) are too quickly glossed over, but, sucked into Terrell's world of ubiquitous handguns, she is literally left holding the bag and begins the downward path of arrest, association and a criminal record.

Not herself a user of hard drugs, Oz is already familiar with being in custody, and, spaced-out when hit by a car, Marisol, too, lands in the same place, all part of the never ending cycle marked by an alarming spike in the percentage of females involved. The women guards are low-key, and, not the sadistic hole of most reality and cinema, the film’s “Youth House” is probably a bed preferable to many inmates’ “on the outs,” i.e., outside, home environments. Psychologically searing, however, is the harangue of a male prisoner, brought by to browbeat them with honesty: institutionalized on and off since adolescence, he sees through them, berates their lack of self-esteem in New Jerseyite Imamu Amiri Baraka’s “empty cage of failure,” and scorns the manipulative men who have used them and put them there. 

“What kind of mother you gone be, when you ain’t shit now?” he screams at cowed Marisol. Indeed, she may no longer even be a mother except in name only, for aunt is in ICU and her cheques will soon dry up and Autumn is already in temporary foster care placement. Regaining parental custody will take bureaucratic years and proof of permanent drug rehabilitation and a steady job. Cornered and pathetic, the mother turns to the habitual refuge of crack cocaine, but even flea market Jimmy (Flaco Navaja), her frequent supplier and possibly the child’s father, rubs her face in her reality. Near hysteria, she trades sex for a pipe from Terrell, for whom equally lonely Suzette is searching in streets and “shooting gallery” alleyways. Staggering and stoned, Marisol runs into bitter, disillusioned Oz, who’s “gotta go [but] where do I gotta go?”

An excellent sister piece to Liz Garbus’ Girlhood documentary, this upsetting more than mere cautionary tale gives end-credits to a sung “ain’t no one innocent, everyone’s guilty.” Like that other, Baltimore-set, non-fiction, it is place-specific yet American-universal. Though film cannot give off the actual smell of such blighted rotting areas, thanks to residents’ cooperation this urgent plea does visually render the disgraceful underbelly. In video, filmed with a 24P SDX-900, some scenes necessarily blur or flatten their bright colors, a shortcoming remedied in the 35mm blowup version to be released theatrically in France. Nor, given time limits and diminishing returns with regard to “structure,” can every issue be considered, such as, for instance, the up to ninety per cent incidence of sexual abuse of such female children.

In avoiding a “faux version” of a deplorable social reality, but limited by budget -- an Indie Spirit nomination for “Best Feature under $500K” -- On the Outs is an indictment that needs to be seen, for which it will depend on word-of-mouth to go much beyond its July 13-26 run at New York’s prestigious Film Forum. God, Country and Motherhood are sacred, yet a sizable part of our rising generation is not only fatherless but, as well, “a motherless child, a long way from home,” with no map. 

(Released by Fader Films; not rated by MPAA.)