Rising young actress Chloe Moretz is set to pull a Dakota Fanning, and has lined up the gritty indie drama “Hick” which will feature a rape scene. Derick Martini is directing the indie coming-of-age story, which is an adaptation of Andrea Portes‘ novel.
According to Variety, the film “tracks a 13-year-old Nebraska girl who gets more than she bargained for when she runs away to Las Vegas.” What it leaves out is that the pistol-packin’ protagonist ends up rolling with a “cocaine snorting grifter” who enlists her help for a robbery and later gets raped by a man in a secluded motel. Here’s the full book synopsis from Publisher’s Weekly:
Portes’s chilling debut tracks a 13-year-old Nebraska girl’s hard-going life on the road. Young Luli knows losers—her “aging Brigitte Bardot” mother, Tammy, and her father, Nick, go at each other every night at the Alibi, the watering hole in hometown Palmyra, Neb. Tammy runs away one morning, and Nick soon follows, leaving Luli alone at home with the Smith and Wesson .45 her Uncle Nipper gave her. Pistol in tow, she hitches rides heading west to Vegas. A crooked man (literally; he “looks like an italic,” says smart-alecky Luli) named Eddie picks her up briefly before throwing her out of the car. Next comes cocaine-snorting grifter Glenda, who enlists Luli as an accessory to a robbery that goes awry. Glenda takes Luli under her wing. The two cross paths again with Eddie, who rapes Luli and ties her up in a secluded motel. Glenda comes to her rescue, but the confrontation with Eddie ends badly.
We really don’t know why young actresses seem to believe that they need to do extreme or out-of-the-ordinary roles in order to prove their salt in Hollywood. As we mentioned Fanning tried to do the same thing in “Hounddog” which was met with poor reviews, and was generally regarded as a transparent attempt to launch herself as a “mature” actress. We don’t think Moretz, who has already earned acclaim for her turn in “Kick-Ass” and is set to star in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo Cabret” alongside Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Kingsley, really needs to go down this path. She has already shown herself to be a very strong actress, so don’t quite get the headfirst jump into a raw indie film that sounds a little ridiculous and overblown already (we’re pretty sure we’ve seen variations of this story about a billion times).
“Hick” is scheduled to shoot later this year in New Mexico, presumably once Moretz wraps on Scorsese’s ‘Hugo Cabret.’