There are a lot of small towns in the US. Many are pretty and have a charm of their own, but chances are you wouldn’t want to grow up in one. With little for the youth to do, it’s no wonder that many of them turn to other activities such as the comfort of over-eating, the taking of narcotic substances, or adding to the teen pregnancy figures. Or in this case, participating in the sinister underground sport of female roller derbying.

Bodeen, Texas is one such town, and Bliss (Ellen Page) is one such teen. She’s reached that age where Bodeen is like a top that shrunk in the wash: it feels too small and just doesn’t fit anymore.

It doesn’t help that her mum (Marcia Gay Harden) not only has an obsession with beauty pageants, but with also entering Bliss into them. Even though she doesn’t enjoy the regular humiliation of it all, she knows how much it means to her mum. She reaches a point in her life however, when pageants and working at the Oink Joint diner (where, incidentally, if customers can chomp down on their infamous ‘Squealer’ burger in under 3 minutes, they get it for free) with her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat, aka Maeby from TV’s Arrested Development) aren’t exactly what she wants from life.

Then, on a shopping trip to Austen with her mum, Bliss is confronted by some female members of a roller derby team. Intrigued, she drags Pash along to a meet, where she’s quickly hooked by the energy and vibrancy of it all. Bliss then lies about her age and auditions to be a member of the Hurl Scouts and gets in. Despite getting a cool nickname – Babe Ruthless – Bliss has her work cut out for her; it just so happens that the Hurl Scouts are bottom of the league and a bit rubbish. But Bliss soon realises that with her skates on, it feels like her life is finally going somewhere.

I think Mayor Boris Johnson is taking these alternatives to London Transport a tad too far.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of roller derbying, it’s a little like the 1975 classic Rollerball, but without any balls: literally, as this one features an all female league. It’s certainly the perfect girlie material for Drew Barrymore to cut her directing debut teeth on. with many of the teams dressing as if they were auditioning for a part in an amateur production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, trust Barrymore to put the ‘ass’ into ‘sassy’. Not only that, but she also features in the film too, as Smashley Simpson.

She was also spot on with the casting: Not only by having the talented Page, Harden and Shawkat on board, but also Juliette Lewis and Kristen Wiig, who is not only a Saturday Night Live regular, but also played Brahbrah in the last series of Flight of the Conchords.

Where Barrymore does slightly take her eye off the ball is by focusing all her attention on Bliss; not only is the pageant subplot highly unbelievable, it’s all rather unnecessary. And then you have her relationship with rocker Oliver (Landon Pigg) that does little to heighten any emotional tension, and feels all too tagged on.

What these extra elements do, rather disappointingly, is detract from the spectacle of the sport and those involved with it. The only evidence of any real personality from the girls we get is from the names of the teams: Fight Attendants, Holy Rollers, Black Widows etc. Otherwise they are pretty much treated like those peripheral characters that appear in US football films. There was a chance here to really show a connection between Bliss and the rest of her team, but with all her other distractions, they become merely glam girls on wheels.

Other than highlighting a sport that certainly many outside of the US wouldn’t be that aware of, Whip It offers very little else in the way of originality. Still, it’s slightly saved by its indie-punk soundtrack and engaging performances from many of its female leads; in particular Page, Shawkat and Wiig. They, along with trying very hard to work out the rules of the game itself, make Whip It a fun enough roller-without-the-coaster ride.