“Winter’s Bone”

Growing up is hard to do, even under the best of circumstances.

And these are hardly the best of circumstances for Ree Dolly, the implacable -- and unforgettable -- teenage heroine of "Winter's Bone."

A double award-winner at this year's Sundance film festival, "Winter's Bone" isn't what you'd describe as a fun time at the movies.

At times, it's almost as heavy going for those of us in the audience as it is for Ree herself.

Yet watching her persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds -- and somehow maintain her integrity in the process -- provides a quiet kind of uplift.

For us, that is.

For Ree Dolly, it's merely a matter of survival.

At an age when many of her peers are preoccupied with boys, clothes and the looming mysteries of maturity, 17-year-old Ree (embodied, with haunting steeliness, by Jennifer Lawrence) is trying to keep her family going from day to day.

That's a challenge anywhere, but in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri, it's an even more daunting prospect.

Her mother sits in a fog, only occasionally mustering a tenuous grasp of reality. And her father -- a modern-day moonshiner who cooks methamphetamine instead of whiskey -- is long gone, leaving Ree to keep her two younger siblings fed, clothed, schooled and safe.

That would be enough for anyone to handle, let alone a youngster like Ree.

But her father has skipped out after his latest arrest. And if he doesn't show up for his next court date, the family property he put up as bond -- including the house where Ree, her mother and siblings live such a hardscrabble existence -- will be seized, casting them to the winds.

So it's up to Ree to track down her errant father, sending her on a harrowing odyssey through the backwoods to discover his whereabouts.

To do so, she must contact a network of kinfolk -- suspicious at best, openly hostile at worst -- who are far from eager to tell her anything. That holds especially true for her menacing, drug-addled uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes).

But she's not asking for help. Not at all. It's not in Ree's nature to do that.

As she instructs her younger brother when he wonders whether they should appeal to a neighbor for a handout of fresh meat, "You don't ask for anything that ought to be given."

That same stoic approach characterizes "Winter's Bone" as a whole.

Writer-director Debra Granik ("Down to the Bone"), who adapted Daniel Woodrell's novel with producer Anne Rosellini , cuts the movie's storytelling style fittingly close to the bone, opting for spare understatement rather than florid excess.

Shot on location in the Ozarks, the movie's wintry hollows and leafless forests provide an unforgiving, yet starkly beautiful, setting -- populated by characters (some of them played by nonprofessional actors) who reflect their bleak surroundings, as does the high-lonesome musical score.

It's a potential minefield of cliches, yet Granik wisely sidesteps most of them, giving the forbidding characters Ree encounters an almost primal power. Ree may be kin to them, but in her determination to lead a different kind of life, she's an outsider.

Besides, her kinfolk don't even trust each other, so how could they, and why should they, trust her?

This unconventional setting helps offset the movie's relentless track-the-clues structure -- and allows things to breathe every now and then, without the pressure of piecing together the puzzle of Ree's father's whereabouts. Some of the movie's most compelling sequences have nothing to do with the mystery and everything to do with how Ree and her family spend their days: the big sister showing her siblings how to shoot and clean squirrels so they'll have something to eat, or a gathering of musicians (led by musical adviser Marideth Sisco) singing and playing the same laments folks have been singing and playing for generations.

Throughout, "Winter's Bone" sings with the bone-deep truths of life's pain and persistence in the face of that pain.

That's thanks in large measure to the movie's pitch-perfect performers, from Garret Dillahunt's self-righteous sheriff -- who's not above a little self-interested bending of the law -- to Dale Dickey's forbidding mountain matriarch.

And, speaking of forbidding, Hawkes' Uncle Teardrop paints a scary, yet poignant, portrait of someone driven to desperate extremes -- and knows how far, far gone he truly is, even if he can't do much about it.

That's the difference between someone like Teardrop and someone like Ree.

Somehow, she knows better. And Lawrence's still, grave performance -- one that's all the more eloquent for its reserve -- reassures us that, no matter how tough the going gets, Ree's tough enough to take it.

That's exactly the kind of heroism you can cheer, even if it's in a movie that no one would, or ever could, describe as cheerful.

Contact movie critic Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.