I wasn't at all sure I would like Gretchen. First of all, promos kept comparing it to Napoleon Dynamite, which I couldn't stand. And even in the first half hour of the film, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to react. A lot of audience members were laughing at the title character when I felt nothing but empathy for her.

Gretchen is a teenage loser: she wears bulky sweaters and turtlenecks to school, swings her arms wildly when she runs, and tends to stare at people a lot. But for some of us who once had teenage loser tendencies, her predicaments felt more real than comic. One of Gretchen's rivals tells her that she'll never be attractive because of her taste in clothes, her flat chest, and her ugly face, and although the speech is blunt, it sounds genuinely high school.

That's ultimately what made me like Gretchen more than I anticipated: it captured an authentic teenage experience, one without easy answers and a tidy, amusing resolution. The filmmakers didn't resort to the usual teen stereotypes or sitcom-style problems, and the characters are viewed with compassion and not contempt. Gretchen's actions and the subsequent results are more extreme than most of our high-school experiences, but her anxiety and frustrations are universal.The film uses extreme close-ups of Gretchen effectively to broadcast her feelings to us in magnification. Some of the sequences are visually stunning; the scene where Gretchen has to select a prom dress is beautifully photographed, with its crazy endless lines of wildly colored, sparkly dresses. I also was impressed with the music, which was delicate and subtle and used syrupy standards to good effect.

The acting is consistently good, which is often rare in a lower-budget film. Courtney Davis is quite believable in the title role, despite the fact that she looks older than high-school age. Betsy Ann Baker is wonderful as Gretchen's mom. Stephen Root shows up briefly as Gretchen's dad and manages to be both amusing and pitiable. I want to say that Gretchen's boyfriend Nicky is automatically funny on sight, but I am not sure if that's because a bunch of people in the audience knew the actor, John Merriman, and laughed every time he appeared onscreen as a sulky teen. (Merriman works for Austin Film Festival.) The boyfriends are probably the most stereotypical characters in the film, played for laughs, but once we realize why Gretchen keeps latching onto these types of guys, they're less comic and more understandable.

Austin filmmaker Steve Collins expanded his short Gretchen & the Night Danger, which won an award at SXSW in 2004, into this feature-length movie. Gretchen occasionally seemed to stretch itself thin to fit as a feature. The movie felt a little too long; specifically, it took too long to end. I liked the final scene of the movie, though. Overall, Gretchen is a beautiful, delicate look at the nasty pains of teenage relationships. And Gretchen could totally kick Napoleon's ass.