“Have you ever confused a dream with life?” asks Susanna Kaysen in the opening line of Girl, Interrupted.  It’s tough to say whether she asks this question before or after her recuperative stint in the nuthouse.

Winona Ryder (Celebrity), who also executive-produced the film, stars as Susanna, a suburban, chain-smoking writer-wannabe that almost kills herself by chasing a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka shortly after her high school graduation in 1967.  She is sent to Claymoore, a mental institution for young women, after one brief meeting with a psychiatrist friend of her father’s.  Since she is over eighteen, Susanna must voluntarily check herself into the home, despite not believing that she has any actual mental problems.  We learn later that her diagnosis is Borderline Personality Disorder, an ailment with generic symptoms that basically means that a person is lazy and self-indulgent.

After taking a tour of the facility with Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg, How Stella Got Her Groove Back), Susanna begins to unpack but is sidetracked by the arrival of recent escapee Lisa (Angelina Jolie, The Bone Collector), a willowy, whacked-out, alpha-female sociopath that manipulates the other girls in Claymoore.  Within moments of her entrance, Lisa does enough screaming to land Jolie her first Oscar nomination.  She oozes crazy like she oozed sex in Pushing Tin.  She’s criminally insane, yet also an intelligent, self-absorbed button-pusher that doesn’t feel crazy as long as she is able to maintain control over a situation.  Apparently, this could get you locked up in the ‘60s, but this describes more than half of the people that I’ve ever known.

Susanna and Lisa hit it off almost immediately, the latter goading the former into not taking medication and rallying against the establishment.  She’s the devil on Susanna’s shoulder – Tyler Durden to Susanna’s Jack.  They dream of escaping from Claymoore and getting jobs at the new DisneyWorld in Florida but settle for breaking into Dr. Melvin’s (Jeffrey Tambor, Teaching Mrs. Tingle) office and reading their clinical diagnoses with fellow nutcases played by Clea DuVall (The Astronaut’s Wife), Brittany Murphy (Drop Dead Gorgeous) and Elizabeth Moss (the First Daughter on The West Wing).

Ryder is decent enough as Susanna, but how long is she going to continue to play teenage roles?  She even keeps a journal here like she did in Heathers.  One of the problems that I had with the film is that at the beginning, Susanna seemed to dwell on flashbacks of integral moments of her life.  The flashbacks stop almost as soon as she hits Claymoore.  Does that mean she’s cured?  I dunno.  Does it mean she was never crazy?  I dunno that either.  Susanna never seems to make any real progress until she meets with Claymoore’s head head-shrink, played well by Vanessa Redgrave (Mrs. Dalloway).  The hapless Jared Leto (Fight Club) also has a small part as Susanna’s draft-dodging boyfriend.

Based on a book by the real Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted is directed by James Mangold (Cop Land), who adapted the script with debut screenwriters Lisa Loomer and Anna Hamilton Phelan.  Some of Mangold’s flashbacks early in the film were done pretty well, but, like I said, they stopped pretty quickly.  Like any film set in that era, the use of music is of particular importance and Mangold doesn’t shortchange us here, using gem after gem – from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends” at the opening to Petula Clark’s “Downtown” during the closing credits.

2:05 - for strong language and content relating to drugs, sexuality and suicide