AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

We end this hour with a movie review. The new film "Ginger & Rosa" star two young actresses with substantial Hollywood pedigrees. Ginger is played by Elle Fanning, who at 14 already has more than 30 movie credits. Rosa is played by Alice Englert. She's the daughter of the Oscar-winning writer-director Jane Campion. Critic Bob Mondello says both actresses get a chance to stretch in "Ginger & Rosa."

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: The film starts with an atomic blast - Hiroshima in 1945 - accompanied by shrieks half a world away as two women in a British maternity ward give birth. Their little girls, Ginger and Rosa, will be inseparable by the time we catch up with them a decade and a half later: young teens in a London that has yet to discover The Beatles, ironing each other's hair, dissolving in giggles while practicing how to kiss...

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MONDELLO: ...and playing patty-cake like the children they still are, just barely. Children who are starting to register the larger world around them, fretting at the beach about Cold War nuclear reports they're hearing on the radio.

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ELLE FANNING: (as Ginger) I'd prefer the world not to end, wouldn't you?

ALICE ENGLERT: (as Rosa) Probably, if I find true love, the kind that lasts forever.

FANNING: (as Ginger) Really, Rosa? I think we should do something about the bomb, you know, protest.

ENGLERT: (as Rosa) I think we should pray.

MONDELLO: To Ginger's surprise, she's handed a crucifix.

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FANNING: (as Ginger) Oh, gosh. Thank you.

MONDELLO: As you can hear, although these two are close, they're beginning to grow apart. Elle Fanning's flame-haired Ginger is following the lead of her activist father. Alice Englert's darker Rosa is following her instincts, especially when it comes to guys.

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ENGLERT: (as Rosa) It says here that a girl's most important possession is a bubbly personality.

FANNING: (as Ginger) Interesting. Do you think Simone de Beauvoir has a bubbly personality?

ENGLERT: (as Rosa) Who?

FANNING: (as Ginger) That French writer, she's an existentialist.

ENGLERT: (as Rosa) Maybe she hasn't read "Girl." It says here that boys don't like girls who are too serious.

MONDELLO: The hormones driving these two and the tumult driving '60s social change are somehow exactly in sync in director Sally Potter's telling. When Cold War constraints meet the sexual revolution, the constraints haven't got a chance - a fact that will separate these girls from each other and also from their parents. Mothers left behind in kitchens as traditions change, fathers who betray families either with wandering eye or simply by wandering off. Small wonder, Ginger and Rosa seek comfort where they can: Rosa in the arms of an inappropriate partner, Ginger with political allies who know her grief is personal, though she's expressing it in broader terms.

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FANNING: (as Ginger) We could all die tomorrow.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (as character) We could, Ginger.

FANNING: (as Ginger) But I don't want to die. I want to grow up and do things.

TIMOTHY SPALL: (as Mark) And you will, honey. Can't you be a girl for a moment or two longer? You'll be a woman soon enough.

MONDELLO: The director has steeped the film in '60s jazz, shot it through with earthy color and filled it with ideas that are just out of her heroines' reach: the realization, say, that there can be a distance between goodness and good thoughts, passions and passionate beliefs. A hard lesson to learn, equally hard to dramatize, but Potter manages in "Ginger & Rosa," an intriguingly complex portrait, both of its characters and of the time of flux they live in. I'm Bob Mondello.

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CORNISH: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.