In this case, the hardened Molly Ringwald is one Vivian Abramowitz, played by the appealing Natasha Lyonne (Everyone Says I Love You). The year is 1976, and Vivian is 15 and every parent’s worst fear. It’s not that Vivian doesn’t have a good head on her shoulders. In fact, she’s wise beyond her years. Trouble is, her chest is beyond her years, too – she’s a veritable boob prodigy weighing in at cup-size C.

Now any girl would be self-conscious about such a sudden growth spurt. For Vivian, the matter is made worse by the cramped and dingy quarters she shares with her brothers (one younger and one older). Not to mention that her father, Murray (Alan Arkin), refers to her as “stacked.” All of this is exacerbated by the fact that her father, divorced and older than the usual dad, keeps moving them around at the dead of night to avoid paying the rent, all the while preaching about the trappings of living within the 90210 zip code no matter how dumpy the place is.

What Vivian needs is some female influence. What she gets is Rita (Marisa Tomei). Rita is a 29-year-old rehab escapee who wields a vibrator and has to borrow her young cousin’s urine for her first day in nursing school, though nursing school is more or less just a front so that Rita and Murray can get money out of Murray’s better-off brother (and Rita’s father).

Meanwhile, Vivian has hooked up with Eliot (Kevin Corrigan), her neighbor who is a Charles Manson expert and who is given the responsibility of being Vivian’s practice guy. She lets him feel her up and so on to see what it’s like, but beyond that, she tells him their relationship is “just a building thing.”

Slums of Beverly Hills is the first full-length feature for writer/director Tamara Jenkins, who dipped into her own experiences as a child of divorce growing up poor in Beverly Hills in the Seventies. The humor comes from the constant indignities Vivian has to face, in which the family bond is stressed to a point of creepy closeness. Her father takes her to get her first bra and then makes her wear said bra with a halter top. At the same time, her older brother has no problem pointing out Vivian’s attributes, sometimes while wearing nothing but briefs. At times the situation breaks out into slapsticky zaniness with accompanying wacky music. And even as the humor falls predictably beneath the belt, it works within the confines of Lyonne’s sympathetic performance and the efforts of a strong supporting cast.