If John Hughes’s movies could be considered as wet dreams of his adolescence (The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), then writer-director Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse would be the equivalent nightmare. Welcome to the Dollhouse isn’t juiced up by shower scenes or nerds creating the woman of their dreams on their home computer. Instead, it’s the story of an outcast named Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), “Wiener Dog” to her classmates, who would give anything to fit in with her junior high environment.

Welcome to the Dollhouse is like a Judy Blume novel from Hell. The angst of adjustment to life in junior high is a familiar theme in many movies and most of juvenile literature, but Dollhouse puts a dark spin on the glossed-over coming-of-age cliché.

Dawn isn’t one of a group of Valley Girl cheerleaders struggling to be the most popular person in her school. In fact, of all the characters in the movie, Dawn is indisputably the least popular. Nobody likes her because she’s ugly, timid, and unforgivably out of fashion (she’s plagued by her thick glasses, mismatched outfits, and outrageous barrettes). Even her teacher dislikes her for “grade grubbing.” Dawn’s only friend is a year younger than she is, still stuck back in elementary school.

At home, Dawn’s life is worse than it is at school. Her older brother Mark (Matthew Faber) is a nerdy high school student whose only interest is fluffing up his college application. Dawn shares a bedroom with her younger sister Missy (Daria Kalinina), their parents’ favorite, a ballerina who spends all her time pirouetting on the front lawn or playing with dolls. Coming home is no sort of escape from the horrors of her school, and Dawn’s only private area is a run-down clubhouse in the backyard. There, she and her friend hold their “Special People Club” meetings and try to comfort one another.

When Mark Wiener decides to start a garage band with some of his high school friends, everything changes for Dawn. Mark and his friends are depressingly sorry musicians, but they decide to enlist the help of Steve, a hunky and popular high school senior, as their lead vocalist. Steve is the kind of guy everyone hates in high school: he’s dumb as dirt, but the women love him. Steve is on the verge of dropping out, and he agrees to join the band in exchange for help from Mark on his computer homework.

When Dawn first sees Steve, she immediately falls for him. She’s captivated by the idea of a popular and attractive guy. In one scene, she sits on the hood of a car swaying as she listens to Steve singing about an inflatable doll. Later, she plays for him on the piano, a pitiful effort that he encourages nonetheless.

“Do you think about girls?” Dawn asks her older brother Mark, hoping for some advice on her new crush.

“Are you kidding?” Mark responds. “I want to get into a good school.” The look on his face says it all: he is serious. She would get more of a reaction from the Pope. Even so, the camera later catches Mark reading a note from his summer girlfriend, saying she’s not ready for ‘what they talked about.’

Dawn is at an age where she doesn’t know what sex is, but thinks she’s ready to lose her virginity to Steve if he would have her. He wouldn’t. To say that he doesn’t know she exists would be unfair, though it’s perfectly clear he would never (and should never) consider her romantically. In the movie’s most disheartening moment, Dawn interrupts Steve and another girl misbehaving to ask if he would like to join her “Special People Club.”

“Special people?” he asks with surprise. “Dawn, special people equals retarded. Your club is for retards.”

At school, Brandon McCarthy (Brendan Sexton Jr.), a pot-smoking guy who picks on Dawn, proves to be the only person at school kind enough to be Dawn’s friend. Ironically, their friendship starts when Brandon threatens to rape Dawn after school. Dawn’s eyes widen at the thought, and we see her sweating fretfully through her next few classes until school is released.

After the final bell rings, Dawn timidly walks outdoors where Brandon is waiting for her, presenting herself as ready to be raped. The scene is both horrifying and absurdly hilarious in what it discloses of both characters’ personalities. Brandon is a nice guy who is trying to play macho, and Dawn is a tough girl who has almost become masochistic after everything she’s had to deal with. Of course, Brandon does not rape her; they go to an abandoned junkyard where the two discover how similar they really are. He kisses her, but makes her promise never to tell anyone about it. His ‘image’ is too precious to be ruined by talk of kissing “Wiener Dog.”

The movie is cruel, but superbly crafted. It’s not a happy story. Dawn is not perfect. She’s as cruel as the other kids who treat her badly. She rejects her former best friend as a ‘faggot,’ saws the heads off of her sister’s dolls, and causes Missy to be kidnapped after one of her ballet practices. The film is not wrapped up nicely in with a happy moral. Instead, Mark tells his sister the advice she’ll need to survive junior high: “High school’s better than junior high. They’ll call you names, but not as much to your face.”

As a whole, the movie reminds us of the mean antics of our junior high classmates and the way we mistreated others too. It’s too easy to forget that we were sometimes as bad as the others when we think of all the bad things that happened in our own junior high experience.

Welcome to the Dollhouse may be a little extreme in its picture of the helplessness of adolescence, but it is a disturbingly candid satire likely to help you unearth many of those forgotten memories. Never before have I seen a comedy so depressing . . . or so genuine.