Musing on how teenage girls are more open to the world than most adults, actress Fairuza Balk thinks it’s a shame so many movies put them down or ignore them.

As Shade, the daughter of a man-weary truck-stop waitress (Brooke Adams) and sister of a bad-girl (Ione Skye) in Allison Ander’s “Gas Food Lodging”, Balk mines that openness, forcing a host of cliches about teenage girls to bite the dust.

She is an iconoclast in resisting her kin’s cynicism about men. Yet as she shuffles around parched desert streets in cowboy boots, bowler, and mirror-spangled bolero, there’s something in her very gait that tells us she’s also her fragmented family’s center of emotional gravity.

Shades had years of observing her mother and sister, says Balk, previously seen in “Return to Oz” and “Valmont.” She knows how painful their lives have been, so she’s going to wait for the right person.