“I’m a woman, hear me scream!”

-Amelia, Girls Rock!

“I hate myself already, so high school doesn’t, like, degrade me that much.”

-Laura, Girls Rock!

Speaking of documentaries (which I was), here’s another one for you: Girls Rock!, which I finally got to see a few days ago. The movie takes viewers into Portland’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, which is just as awesome as it sounds; girls ages 8-18 have a week to form bands with their fellow campers, take classes with actual lady-rockers, write a song, and perform it for an audience. Girls Rock! had the usual limited documentary release about a year ago, and I missed it. During the last year, though, I made everyone I know watch the trailer on YouTube, often more than once. Now it’s your turn:

You see why I was so anxious for the DVD?

Now that I’ve seen it, I can say that the film is far from perfect (although still quite good). The directors chose to focus on four campers, but we never quite get enough background on them. On top of that, the scenes of rehearsals and intra-band conflicts become repetitive, while the classroom scenes and the final concert are truncated. These issues could have easily crippled the film; luckily, the subject matter is interesting enough to make me forgive just about any directorial missteps.

Honestly, how could anyone hate a movie that features and eight-year-old who spends her time writing atonal dirges about her dog, and inventing new guitar chords with name like “Negative 10″? That’s Amelia, a.k.a. Am, an experimental visionary who happens to be a shy, thoughtful girl with a flower-shaped guitar. The directors also introduce us to Palace, a punk rock demon cleverly disguised as the world’s most angelic seven-year-old (she’s the one growling “Rock ‘n’ Roll!” at the beginning of the trailer). Seriously, she is so fucking punk rock it will make your eyes bleed. If you need proof, you can download her song “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” and hear the magic for yourself.

In addition to these two, we also meet two teenage campers: Misty, a recovering drug addict, and Laura, who is — there’s no polite way to say this — a Korean-American death metal fan trapped in Oklahoma. Aside from offering a more mature perspective on the camp’s proceedings, they also provide a striking contrast with the younger girls. For all her shyness, Amelia can become quite chatty on camera, spinning theories about music and school and her dog Pippi; when she steps in front of a microphone, her inhibitions seem to vanish entirely. Laura, on the other hand, is talkative and social and genuinely funny at times, but will cheerfully admit to self-hatred when asked.

Much of the movie is dedicated to figuring out where and why this disconnect occurs. Scattered throughout the film are brief animated segments, which are really just a way to deliver statistics without resorting to captions or narration. Although I was ambivalent about the segments themselves (I found they broke up the flow of the movie, and took up running time that could have been better spent on the bands in concert), they provide answers to those questions, and raise several new, more difficult ones. What can girls do — indeed, what can anyone do — to get back in touch with the brilliantly uninhibited visionaries they were at age 8? There’s no obvious answer, but I suspect that the people in charge of Rock Camp are on the right track.

I could go on nitpicking, but I’d prefer to end on a positive note. Because for all its little flaws, this is still a movie about a fascinating subject. Without it, I probably wouldn’t even know that Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls existed, and I definitely wouldn’t have “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” on my playlist. If they have to get a little preachy, or overstate a few points, fine. Those points — about society’s expectations of women, the numbing conformity of adolescence, the thrill of finding people like yourself — still need to be made, frequently and at a very high volume.

It also doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack kind of kicks ass.