Meet the female Napoleon Dynamite: She’s an awkward 14-year-old whose unfortunate possession of certain boy parts has earned her the forever nickname of “Spork.”
Spork (a heartbreaking Savannah Stehlin) is the kind of girl who arrives at school each day with her impenetrable thicket of barbed-wire hair dotted with spitballs launched at her on the bus. Her brother is raising her in a pocket wasteland of a trailer not far from where her mother lies — under a tombstone marked “Mommy.”
As war with a squadron of Mean Girls beckons, Spork finds a savior in her opposite number at the trailer park: An ebullient, Afro-Sheen-addicted classmate named Tootsie Roll (a hilarious Sydney Park) who schools Spork in the ways of booty-poppin’ clown dancing. Soon enough, no beeyotches be messin’ with our Spork. For reals.
The script, by 30-year-old writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr., is jazzed with John Waters-caliber campy satire (“Choose Youre [sic] God and Make Some Friends” reads a sign at a school religious fair held in the gym). But camp often means a lack of feeling and generalized disdain; not so in “Spork,” which has as much heart as “Sixteen Candles.”