Studious Grace Berry (Eva Amurri) is denied financial aid for school because her irresponsible mother Rhonda (Susan Sarandon) ruined her credit history. Her sister Taylor (Willa Holland) refuses to lie to get a lawsuit settlement. She works at the water park and needs $12k by the end of the summer to pay for school. Dorian Spitz (Anton Yelchin) is rebelling against his rich family and forced to work at the park. Dorian convinces Grace to sell drugs with him. She falls for rich kid Ben Pretzler (Justin Chatwin). Dorian has a crush on Grace and Taylor is interested in Dorian.Eva Amurri is not quite right. She's a little too old. Her character is suppose to be a doormat but Eva is never that as a personality. The pull of pairing mother and daughter is not enough to justify the miscast. The family dysfunctions are compelling but not what is done with them. The movie is building some big drama. The actors are all doing good work. The movie just never gets all there.

i watched this movie a second time recently and it is even more entertaining and compelling on second seeing!there isn't much i can say here that hasn't been covered by the previous reviews on this page. praise is praise and i cannot praise this movie nor reveal anything the other reviews haven't competently revealed to the reader.my suggestion is to just watch this story as it is made for people who enjoy great characterization, intelligent dialog, and a story you will naturally find yourself wrapped up into!it's a shame good cinema gets ignored so in this country!

This is a surprisingly good movie about a recent high-school graduate (Eva Amurri) who's irresponsible mother (Susan Sarandon) has blown her college fund and destroyed her credit, so she gets together with a very moral but very misguided rich kid (Anto Yelchin)to deal dope in their "middle-of-nowhere" small town. A love triangle develops between the girl, her erstwhile "business partner", and her precocious, aspiring model younger sister (Willa Holland), but it is a largely unrequited one as she is uninterested in him and he resists the jailbait charms of her sister.Eva Amurri is a beautiful and talented actress, if a bit long in the tooth to be playing a recent high school graduate. Willa Holland is an unusually beautiful teenager who has since gone on to work in European films like "Summer in Genoa" (as an even more sexually precocious youngster). She does a good job playing an aspiring underage model. It's nice to see Susan Sarandon playing a completely unsympathetic role like this. The real surprise though is Anton Yelchin who I usually find incredibly annoying even in movies I otherwise like like "Alpha Dog". Instead of wanting to kick his teeth down his throat as usual though, I actually kind of liked his character here (although strangely this is the second time he played a sympathetic drug-dealer--he had a very similar role in the more famous, but overrated "Charlie Bartlett).A lot of credit also has to go to director John Stockwell. It's interesting that two of the more interesting and underrated indie directors today, John Stockwell and Keith Gordon, once appeared together as ACTORS in the very mediocre 1983 horror movie "Christine". Stockwell has come the closest to mainstream success (or, depending on how you look at it, selling out) with films like "Crazy/Beautiful" and "Blue Crush", but he does better I think with smaller pictures like this. I'd recommend this.

Middle of Nowhere is a touching character study given an extra resonance by pairing the real life mother & daughter Susan Sarandon & Eva Amurri, playing a mother & daughter. Susan Sarandon takes a back seat while Eva Amurri really shines in her role as Grace, the older of two daughters being raised by her mother after their father's suicide. While mother's attention is focused on getting her younger daughter to modeling school, Grace has to find a summer job to raise money to fulfill her ambition of going to medical school. She does get a job at a water park where he meets Dorian (Anton Yelchin) who has an unusual scheme to find money to get Grace to college.This movie is full of real characters with whom is easy to identify and empathize with. The acting is great with Amurri and Yelchin the standouts.