"Mi Vida Loca," Allison Anders's brilliant study of girl gangs in Los Angeles' Echo Park, the boyz n the hood come and go, but the women endure. Sad Girl, one of the film's narrators, laments that by age 21, the men in their lives are either dead or disabled or in prison. As a result, the women in the film are united by a inviolable bond. The men may have their gangs, but by comparison they seem lost and disenfranchised. The women are family.

It's hard not to envy these vibrant Latinas their cool solidarity. The streets here aren't merely mean; they're sun-drunk and buzzing with life. According to the popular Hollywood view, all the dreams in the barrio are of getting out. But in "Mi Vida Loca," the characters seem curiously contented. They don't bother themselves with dreams.

Structurally, the picture is a series of fragments, with the narration passed like a baton in a relay race from one character to another. If the film has a main character, it's Sad Girl, and with the three-dot tattoo in the corner of one eye -- they look like tiny teardrops -- she lives up to her name as the gang's melancholy nexus. Sad Girl (Angel Aviles) and Mousie (Seidy Lopez) have been the tightest of friends since childhood. They have watched each other's backs and gone through all the ordeals of growing up together. At first, it looks as if nothing could come between these inseparable soul mates; then Mousie meets Ernesto (Jacob Vargas), a smooth-talking young tough from the neighborhood who romances her and gets her pregnant.

After Mousie has her baby, she becomes so absorbed by her new role as a mother that she doesn't have time for anyone -- not even Ernesto. While she and her daughter trade Eskimo kisses, Ernesto begins to feel lonely and starts putting the moves on Sad Girl.

Like Mousie, Sad Girl has Ernesto's baby too, sparking a bitter feud that dominates the movie's narrative. But though the rivalry between Sad Girl and Mousie gives the material a dramatic spine, Anders is less interested in plot than in the black curve of a character's eyeliner or the trajectory of a well-hurled insult. Her characters exist in revelatory flashes. There's La Blue Eyes (Magali Avarado), a proper girl who studies instead of hanging out but ends up falling for the neighborhood Lothario (Jesse Borrego). And Giggles (Marlo Marron) freaks out her friends after she gets out of jail with her talk of becoming -- of all things -- a computer programmer.

Anders's zigzagging story line allows her to follow side roads that result in beautiful digressions of the sort you wouldn't find in a more conventional film. The best of these is an exquisite scene in which a young gangbanger named Little Sleepy (Gabriel Gonzalez) goes for advice to his older namesake, Big Sleepy (Julian Reyes), who receives the boy with an indulgent deference.

While this free-form approach allows Anders to exploit her extraordinary powers of observation, it occasionally breaks the film's rhythms and disrupts its momentum. Though the picture doesn't build from scene to scene, that doesn't matter: Each segment on its own is richly detailed and vivid.

What matters is the way these homegirls banter and pull together their lives. Working from her own script, Anders has something like perfect pitch for the secret codes between these sisters, and she brushes aside the customary hysteria about life in the 'hood.

In one extraordinary scene, Sad Girl is approached in the park by an old friend who's so strung out on drugs that he's barely recognizable. Instead of flashing a knife or hitting her up for money, he asks her if maybe she might talk to him from time to time. Granted, it's not the stuff of headlines, but just maybe it's the stuff of life.

Mi Vida Loca is not rated.

Copyright The Washington Post

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