“Girl power” movies occupy a tenuous space between the comfortable niche reserved for genre and cult status films, as feminist pieces, and on the other side, self-parody, all yap and no bite. Films with the best of intentions can accidentally swing both ways. Let’s rephrase that …

It’s difficult to release a film about women and issues facing women without preaching about century-old patriarchal ills. Make the film too effeminate or girly-celebratory, and you risk losing the Y-chromosome audience. What better way to strip a woman of power than to avoid taking her seriously?

Bliss Cavendar (Oscar-nominee Ellen Page, Juno herself) knows this story all too well. Her mother Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden, Mystic River, with a lovely Texas drawl) ignores her daughter’s disinterest in beauty pageants and debutante balls. She has traditional ideas of womanhood and femininity. Her youngest daughter gets it, and wins huge trophies with an adorable gap-toothed smile. Bliss, on the other hand, takes dares from her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat, TV’s Arrested Development) and makes speeches at those same pageants with neon blue hair.

Both work in an adorable piggy-themed diner in rural Bodeen, TX. Bliss gets the lovely irony-free joy of serving her popular classmates whom she regularly competes against and loses to in local pageants. She is already feeling trapped by the diner, by her mother and her small town.

A shopping trip to the local big city, Austin (shot on location and captured in all its mini-metropolitan glitter), lands a chance encounter with girls from the roller derby circuit, and a flyer to the local match. Bliss feels the pull of a higher calling. She tells her mother she’s taking an SAT class, jumps in the car with Pash, fakes her age and gets into the world of roller derby. Imagine hockey without the stick and puck combined with horse racing without the gambling, or the illusion of sophistication. With, you guessed it … all-female teams.

These are girls working dead-beat jobs by day and beating each other to death by night, played by powerhouse actresses such as Drew Barrymore, Zoe Bell (the stuntwoman on Xena), the rapper Eve, Ari Graynor (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) and the ’90s icon of young rebellious womanhood … Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers, Cape Fear) herself, swagger and sass intact.

Nicknames and team titles are glorious, kitschy portmanteaus of masculine aggression with feminine twists, or just giddy cleverness: the Hurl Scouts and the Holy Rollers. Girls call themselves Babe Ruthless, Smashly Simpson, Bloody Holly, Rosa Sparks and Iron Maven. The movie is in love with these titles and its own sense of cuteness. I think I saw the key grip for the movie get the nickname “Cat Snatch Fever” in the credits.

It would be too mean to give away the ending. The posters tell you that Bliss tries out and makes the team, and logic and knowledge of the Secret Plot where the protagonist must keep a Secret (or two) tells the viewer where the necessary plot twists involving the mother and the 21+ policy of the roller derby league will come into play. Bliss meets a Cute Boy in a Cute Way, and he plays in a band (Austin is the live music capital of the world … and of course they go on a date to the Waterloo record store) that goes away on tour and breaks her … never mind. The plot’s a cliché and the ending borrows from Rocky. No surprise.

The surprise is in the small performances: how real Bliss is in Ellen Page’s shoes; how her father Earl (Daniel Stern, Home Alone) embodies the modern Texan man, and yet plays second-fiddle to his domineering wife; how that wife reconciles change and motherhood and living vicariously through her daughter; how Pash and Bliss make a pair of real best friends and how the roller derby coach (Andrew Wilson) navigates being a man in the rare woman’s arena.

There’s a beautifully shot scene of Bliss and her boyfriend discovering each other’s bodies in a swimming pool set gracefully to music. It makes up for the muffled, incoherent shots of roller derby.

Whip It is a movie by a woman, starring women, for everyone, because despite the brief and thankfully sparse man-hating moments or faux-indie cuteness, and the rookie mistakes of a bold new directing voice, Whip It (a reference to a roller derby acceleration technique … not porn or Devo), is a universal film about ambition and self-realization.

And girls going absolutely fucking bonkers. On Barbie roller skates.