Virgins in the movies tend to be pert blondes. Or they look like Jason Biggs, Jonah Hill, and Michael Cera. Adepero Oduye is what they almost never look like: a dark-skinned, strong-faced teenager. Oduye stars in “Pariah,’’ about a 17-year-old Brooklyn lesbian named Alike Freeman. Alike - (it’s pronounced “Ah-LEE-kay’’) - surveys the available peers and role models and more or less asks: Is this all there is? She’s undersexed and wants to change that. But, like the boys in movies, she isn’t sure how to pull it off.
This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.’’ and “I Like It Like That.’’ That conversation has moved to the music of Rihanna and Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj. And there are versions of it on BET and VH1. But turning to a reality show like “Basketball Wives’’ in order to savor that experience will only make you wish you were dead. Regardless, it’s not at the movies. Neither, for that matter, is the black urban middle-class from which Alike hails. So “Pariah’’ really feels like something rare. The white rubber penis she ruefully tries on amounts to a comical assessment of American movies’ sexual preference.
