Aria (Giulia Salerno), not quite the life of the party, in Misunderstood (Sundance Selects)

If you take the word sweet, whisk away the S and move a few letters around, you end up with twee. Asia Argento’s Misunderstood veers between the two states while chronicling the travails of a preteen girl and her eccentric family in 1980s Rome. Along the way the film flirts with peril and incendiary themes, but the project is too good-naturedly unfocused to really make much of them, except a gentle nostalgia for a kooky girlhood.

The family dynamic opens with a rancorous family meal where pianist Mama (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and actor Papa (Italian movie and TV idol Gabriel Garko) exchange scabrous insults and snarl at their three children. The dialogue is almost worthy of John Waters minus the fiendish glee, and daughter Aria (Giulia Salerno) opens her eyes wide at the invective. You’re going to see countless close-ups of those innocent, adorable eyes widening as the movie goes on, and your response to the movie may depend on how effectively you think this functions as a dramatic device.

Beleaguered at home and put-upon at school, Aria careens from mishap to screw-up like an Italian Curious George. Misunderstood rolls out her childish rites of passage: a crush on the school bad boy, hijinks with mailboxes that annoy a concierge, a falling-out with a best buddy, getting yelled at by a sourpuss teacher at school.

Argento tosses in danger and oddity to mix up these routine shenanigans. Aria falls in with homeless denizens of the night, vandalizes her home with Mama’s rock-and-roll boy toy, and hosts not one but two birthday parties that end in disaster. Incestuous attractions are hinted at within the family. All of this darkness has about as much emotional impact as the scenes of Aria making prank phone calls. She’s busy, but her antics lack traction.

Part of the reason that Misunderstood feels so tame is because of Argento’s skill at setting luxurious scenes. The director has cloistered much of Aria’s angst within the family’s comfortable apartments, saturated in pinks and turquoises and bathed in golden light. Interiors are beautiful but claustrophobic, and it comes as a relief when Aria and her friends hit the streets of Rome. On the plus side, smart and unusual New Wave music selections give the movie some edge and a sense of being sharper than it actually is.

Also on the up-and-up, Argento offers her adult actors plenty of room to bask in. Gainsbourg clearly relishes playing a monstrous egotistical genius with a tender side, channeling Anna Magnani and a hot-pants Chrissie Hynde. Author Alice Munro wrote a description in a New Yorker story that describes Gabriel Garko to a T: “He was both handsome and silly-looking.” Perhaps Garko’s strutting turn as a hot-tempered, fatuous actor is meant as a sort of meta-commentary on his Italian stardom. He and Gainsbourg have a high old time exchanging juicy insults. (“I’m famous all over the world. They write about me in encyclopedias, you whore!”) Their exchanges lack the sting of real emotion, but they’re entertaining.

By the end of the movie, we’ve been treated to several scenes of Aria reading her saccharine school essays out loud and admonishing us to understand and treat her better. Misunderstood is like a conversation with a child–kinda cute, rambling, and ultimately not very memorable.