Forever Mary

Like a teenager, Forever Mary is about a substitute teacher (Michele Placido) in a barbaric reformatory in Palermo, Sicily, has more energy than it knows what to do with. The boys, played mostly by street kids, have been irreparably damaged by their environments. As the transvestite hooker Mary (Alessandro di Sanzo) tells the teacher, no matter how rehabilitated, he will always be somewhere between a man and a woman — ''forever Mary.''

The message is grim and unsentimental without, thankfully, any doses of Hollywood uplift, and the characters are memorable. The only shame is that the director, Marco Risi, lacks the visual and narrative style to turn all this dysfunction into a more cinematic drama. B+