Dawn Davenport (Divine) is a bad seed. Expelled from high school and a teenaged runaway, she hooks up with the first dude who picks her up hitchhiking, Earl (also Divine), and gets knocked up. Unsurprisingly, Earl is a deadbeat who refuses to support her, so Dawn takes a series of crap jobs before joining her friends Chicklette (Susan Walsh), and Concetta (Cookie Mueller) as a house burglar. She meets Donald (David Lochary) and Donna Dasher (Mary Vivian Pearce), a couple who have a fetish for photographing crime, and continues to spiral further out of control.
If you are not into John Waters' filmography, this is not going to be a good entry point. It is one of his earliest features and way before he became anything approaching mainstream. It is a cult classic, however, and surprisingly sweet. NOT in content, but in how Waters very obviously loves his cast and crew. He films them with such an eye for their humanity, even as he allows them to be disgusting.
(It might get a little confusing pronoun-wise because Divine the actor never used she/her, only he/him, but in this instance he was playing a female character, so I'm going to use she/her when I'm talking about Dawn, and he/him when I'm talking about Divine.) As I said, this was early in the partnership between Divine and Waters, but it's very clear that Divine was born to be a star. He's utterly magnetic in this, even when shrieking and chewing scenery. Everyone else is...trying their best.
This movie was made for approximately $27.50 and features Waters' beloved Baltimore as well as good-natured family and friends, including Susan Lowe's literal newborn son. I cannot stress enough that this is NOT for everyone. Hell, it's not even for mostly anyone. But it's available for rent on Amazon. For some reason, I had $9.99 in credits so they literally gave me this movie for free and I still don't know if I'd ever watch it again. But I'm enough of a freak that I probably will.
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