Rookie director explores teen girl angst with music-filled ‘Bang Bang Baby’

TORONTO – Rookie filmmaker Jeffrey St. Jules says he writes what he doesn’t know — like what it’s like to be a teenage girl.

He envisioned the life of a dream-filled, song-in-her-heart romantic with a penchant for all things cotton candy pink for his surreal ’60s-set romp “Bang Bang Baby.”

“Suburgatory”‘s Jane Levy plays the doe-eyed dreamer Stepphy.

“You can’t limit yourself to just characters who are directly your experience. I guess there’s this notion of ‘write what you know,’ but for me I often find it’s more liberating to explore a character (in which) you haven’t lived that experience,” says St. Jules.

Archetypes abound in the writer/director’s first feature-length outing, set in the fictional Canadian town of Lonely Arms, where Stepphy dreams of moving to New York to become a famous singer.

She’s bound by duty to care for her alcoholic father, played by “Fargo”‘s Peter Stormare, a single parent who gave up his own dreams of music stardom to care for Stepphy when her mother abandoned them.

On top of that, the advances of a creepy admirer and a strange chemical leak wreak havoc on Stepphy’s psyche. She fears she’ll never get out — until her rock star idol Bobby Shore, played by Justin Chatwin, turns up in a broken-down car.

St. Jules fills the tale with outlandish song-and-dance sequences as Stepphy’s dark reality meshes with her dreams.

“It becomes sort of unhealthy as things progress in the film but I’ve always made movies that were somehow related to themes of escapism,” says St. Jules, originally from Fall River, N.S.

“It’s sort of representative of her dreams and her fantasies and the ability to break into song is liberating and it’s fun. You can be absurdly humorous and sincerely emotional at the same time and that’s a mix that I like a lot in films.”

It’s a mix that has resonated with critics, as well — the film snagged the best Canadian first feature prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

St. Jules notes that boost is helping him promote the quirky feature, and pursue his next project, about two teen sister detectives.

It’s also set in the ’60s and features a healthy dose of “naivete and dreaminess.”

“It’s sort of a story of loss of innocence and growing up and experiencing the growing out of the character of the young teen detective into something more complex,” he says.

“Bang Bang Baby” opens Friday in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.