Eve Plumb gives a soft but rather touching performance as a naive teen from the sticks who ends up working the Hollywood Boulevard. I loved it when Dawn and her troubled roommate Alexander finally get electricity to their dump ("Bottled sunlight", Dawn says), and the brief scenes where Alexander is tempted by his gift-giving gay customers are handled with surprising resonance and taste. It's not an especially campy movie, despite the glitter rock songs (The Runaways screaming "Cherry Bomb!") and the presence of a Brady Buncher playing a prostitute. Rather, the film has good location work, interesting characters and editing. It would be easy to tag the film as TV-styled exploitation, yet it has its heart in the right place. In its day, this was a bigger ratings winner than Linda Blair's "Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic" which started fresh a timeworn cycle: the teens-in-trouble genre.
