Paranoid and anxiety-prone individuals should not be permitted to live in nuclear-obsessed, Cold War-era London with parents still smarting from World War II bombing attacks. Such people should not be allowed to spend copious amounts of time listening to radio reports on the inevitable end of humanity, or have pacifist fathers and chronically depressed mothers. That is simply a recipe for disaster. However, in the event that a movie such as “Ginger & Rosa” prevails upon itself to depict the previous catastrophic situation, Elle Fanning is, beyond a doubt, the right actress to play the part. Fanning’s incredible acting saves what is otherwise a heavy-handed and overly dramatic film.

Only 14 years old, Fanning plays a 17-year-old Ginger whose one mantra throughout the film is, “The whole world could be blown to pieces any minute.” In a kind of 1960s nihilism, Ginger goes about her life always with the notion that everyone she knows could be dead tomorrow because of the nuclear arms race between Europe, America, and the Soviet Union. She frantically joins protest groups like “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament” and writes overly dramatic sonnets about the destruction of the human race as her family life explodes into ruin. The camera spends far too much time focused on Ginger’s face, but Fanning manages to make the most out of the long close-ups; she bites her lip shyly or allows a smile to burst across her face during her most serious moments, a disarming break in emotion that draws attention to Ginger’s very young age.

The bare and incredibly confined plot does little for the momentum of the story, but nevertheless the emotional climax of the movie succeeds because of Fanning’s raw and childlike frustration. Choking through tears but struggling to hold her own as an adult, Ginger confronts her father and her best friend at the same time. Because of Fanning’s understated yet ambitious portrayal of her character in the scenes leading up to the climax—moments where Fanning breaks her character’s attempt at maturity, or the tortured, uncertain nights Ginger spends twisting her pillow in anguish—her collapse at the end of the movie is deserved, and even superb.

But director and writer Sally Potter’s script leaves much to be desired. The fear Ginger projects about the possibility of nuclear war—can be captured nicely in just the trailer. Aside from a rather nauseating relationship between Ginger’s father Roland (Alessandro Nivola) and her best friend Rosa (Alice Englert), the plot does not stray from the same conflict and same cast of characters. The isolated storyline is exhausting, and the experience is a bit like continuously pulling one strand of hair after another from your scalp; it doesn’t feel like such a serious action, but by the end you realize an entire patch of hair is missing.

Provided, Potter does make up for a lacking plot by nicely exploring themes of confinement and pacifism. We are to assume that the reason Ginger and her downtrodden mother (Christina Hendricks) do not stand up for themselves and their emotional well-being is because Roland has trained them both to be pacifists. And we are also supposed to assume that the claustrophobic, confined feeling created by the limited scope and tiny number of characters in the film stems from another of Roland’s sayings: “There’s a sort of poetry in small spaces. Confinement can be beautiful, but only if it’s by choice.” Imprisoned in his youth for refusing to fight for his country in World War II, Roland is pitiable and easily vilified for his treatment of his daughter and wife. Nivola plays his Roland as both cold and charismatic; it was the script that did not allow for much more depth that Nivola could have accessed. From the beginning, Potter drops blatant hints that Roland was after Rosa, and because of the lackluster script, Roland’s final monologue about pacifism comes off forced and fake.

Ginger’s mother Natalie is also woefully underdeveloped. In background, Natalie has all the workings for a full, interesting character; she is a former painter who had a child with a conscientious objector at the height of the war. Instead of exploring the mother’s character, though, Potter only catches the moments when Natalie whines for Roland to come home, bitterly yells at Ginger to grow up, or commits a final act of desperation at the end of the film. Hendricks had little opportunity to share the gentler, saner parts of her character, just as Nivola was only allowed to be ungenerous and self-centered on film.

In such a stressed, confined environment, though, one aspect of the film remains real and true: Ginger’s touching and complicated relationship with Rosa, and their self-conscious, painful transformation into adults leaves the movie with a not altogether unsavory taste. If nothing else, Fanning and Englert have created a memorable representation of the uncertainty and paranoia ubiquitous in the ‘60s, creating another significant interpretation of a decade so oft-portrayed in film and music.

—Staff writer Virginia R. Marshall can be reached at virginiarosemarshall@college.harvard.edu.