MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Day’ a Gritty Look at Teen Runaways : The film captures the catch-as-catch-can scariness of living on (and off) the streets.

The teen runaways in “Where the Day Takes You” (selected theaters) congregate under freeway overpasses, in seedy diners, along Hollywood Boulevard. They cadge spare change from just about anybody within hearing distance; some of them pack pistols, shoot dope, shoot each other. Their ragamuffin camaraderie is a haphazard attempt to create a self-made family to replace the real family they’ve fled. The brief, intense unions can be shattered at any moment, leaving the street kids dispossessed yet again.

Director Marc Rocco, working from a script he co-wrote with Michael Hitchcock and Kurt Voss, understands how difficult it is to capture the immediacy of the street kids’ lives within a dramatized format. He gives the film (rated R for drug use, language and violence) a quasi-documentary aliveness in places, and some of the actors, notably Dermot Mulroney, match up with Rocco’s caught-in-the-act style. It’s an extraordinarily intuitive performance by a young actor who could become a major talent. The letdown of the film is that, for all its impassioned outrage, it’s minor.

It works best when it’s at its loosest and most improvisatory. Whenever the seams in the script show, the film loses its grit and takes on the aspects of a made-for-TV drama about runaways. The filmmakers haven’t figured out how to reconcile their do-gooders’ instincts with the nihilism and despair that crowds their story.

The problem with most films about teen druggies and runaways is that they eventually spiral into a self-immolating oblivion. Unlike the characters on the screen, we in the audience can see the bleak denouement coming a mile away. “Where the Day Takes You” is no exception, although it also works in an upbeat coda that hasn’t been earned by what came before. The script’s social consciousness seems overexerted, as if the film were intended as a fund-raiser for teen halfway homes. The strongest and most cauterizing films about street-children--”Pixote,” for instance, or “Shoeshine” or the documentary “Streetwise”--have always transcended their social activist trappings.

It may seem unfair to compare “Where the Day Takes You” to those films, but the comparison, at least thematically, is apt; it has a seriousness of purpose that sometimes results in moments of real power. The film captures the catch-as-catch-can scariness of living on (and off) the streets. We can see how the kids, very well played by Balthazar Getty, James Le Gros, Will Smith, Sean Astin, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ricki Lake and others, work up theatrical poses as a form of survivalists’ street theater. Their outrageousness is a kind of camouflage; it’s supposed to mask their fear (though of course it only accentuates it). The quality of observation may be closer to sociological than dramatic, but the film at its best shows you how blurred the distinction can be. You can feel let down by most of this movie and still be grateful for what it does achieve.

‘Where the Day Takes You’

Dermot Mulroney: King

Sean Astin: Greg

Lara Flynn Boyle: Heather

A Cinetel Films presentation released through New Line Cinema. Director Marc Rocco. Producer Paul Hertzberg. Executive producers Lisa M. Hansen and Marc Rocco. Screenplay by Kurt Voss and Michael Hitchcock and Marc Rocco. Cinematographer King Baggott. Editor Russell Livingstone. Costumes Michael Fitzpatrick. Music Mark Morgan. Production design Kirk Petruccelli. Set decorator Gregg Grande. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (drug use, language and violence).