Entertainment

YOU’LL EAT UP THIS INTELLIGENT DRAMA

WHEN last seen on the big screen, in “Twilight,” talented actress Kristen Stewart was playing a high school student in love with a hunky schoolmate who happened to be a vampire.

Now, in “The Cake Eaters,” she’s Georgia, a high schooler with a progressively deteriorating terminal disease of the nervous system, which causes slurred speech and spastic movements.

At age 15, she has one overwhelming wish – to “lose it” with a guy, even if she doesn’t love him. “I don’t have a lot of time to waste,” she reasons.

And so she sets her eyes on the oddly named Beagle (Aaron Stanford), a young kitchen worker at her school.

First, she invites him over to help her with homework. Then, sporting a fetching new pixie hairdo, she entices Beagle to a modest motel for her own deflowering.

As it happens, Beagle’s widower dad (Bruce Dern) has long been getting it on with Georgia’s frisky grandmother (Elizabeth Ashley), adding more complications to the girl’s life.

“The Cake Eaters,” filmed in the Catskills, is the directorial debut of actress Mary Stuart Masterson, working from a script by one of the movie’s actors, Jayce Bartok.

He plays Beagle’s brother, a would-be musician who ran off to New York and arrives back home too late for his mom’s funeral. Masterson draws nuanced performances from her ensemble cast, which also includes Melissa Leo in a small part.

With so much junk cluttering movie houses, it is a shame that it took two years for this sweet, intelligent drama to get a release before heading for DVD. But such is the sad state of the movie business.

I only wish that more had been done with a subplot that is introduced early on, then forgotten about: Georgia posing semi-nude for her aspiring-photographer mother as a way to draw attention to the deadly disease.

vam@nypost.com

THE CAKE EATERS Puppy love. Running time: 95 minutes. Not rated (sexuality). At the Cinema Village in Manhattan and the Cobble Hill Cinemas in Brooklyn.

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