BILLED as the story of a girl who got everything wrong but got everything right, Riding In Cars With Boys is based on the memoirs of Beverly D'Onofrio, who turned her blighted small-town life story into an irreverent best-selling novel.

Penny Marshall's rites-of-passage movie becomes the Drew Barrymore show, a showpiece for the former wild child whose own troubled past informs her heart-felt, sincere and honest performance on Beverly's journey of self-discovery from 15 to 36.

To steer a path away from sentimentality, Barrymore's Beverly is not the narrator. Instead her story is seen through the eyes of her son (Adam Garcia), whose birth was to change her life plans so dramatically at 15.

The film opens with Bev's son at the wheel in 1981, the first boy, the first ride of the movie's title, before switching to a journey with her strict policeman father (James Woods), and then to another kind of ride in the backseat, this time a drunken teenage fumble with sweet, simplistic slacker Ray Hasek (Steve Zahn) in the early 1960s.

Dad the highly religious police chief insists they marry, consigning young Bev to housewife drudgery in her staid, stymied neighbourhood.

Beverly's dream had always been to be a writer - the news imparted in her pregnancy confession note to her father might not have impressed him but the syntax certainly would - and she refuses to let that dream die in the face of knock-backs from colleges and her husband skiving off fatherhood duties in favour of drugs and booze.

She wants the best for herself, and the best start in life for her son, a clash of desires that will not win her any prizes in a Best Mother competition, and gradually resentment builds in her son.

Penny Marshall, directing her first movie in five years, sends her film back and forth in time, a somewhat giddying device that makes Drew Barrymore's down-to-earth performance all the better, not least because the director shows no particular affection for Beverly.

Beverly is working against the odds; so too is Barrymore, who is especially impressive in her rebellious, plucky teenage guise, garnering sympathy for Beverly's predicament.

Through no fault of her own, she is less effective in Beverly's joyless mid-thirties scenes with her by-now adult son, not least because Barrymore and Garcia look too close in age. Indeed, the film even makes a joke of this early on.

Marshall's direction is strong on the comic content, delivered with a light touch, not least in the sparky relationship of Beverly and her best friend (Brittany Murphy). However, the drama grows more leaden with the passing of the years, a victim of Marshall's waning enthusiasm. Yet still Barrymore emerges with the best turn of her fluctuating career.