What Alice Found could well be the result of someone daring writer-director A. Dean Bell to make a movie about a young woman's slow descent into truck-stop and rest-area prostitution without being shrill, exploitative, or titillating, while borrowing nothing from Lars von Trier's modern-martyr dramas. If Bell had any money riding on this theoretical dare, he should feel free to collect. As the titular Alice, just-out-of-high-school newcomer Emily Grace carries herself with a fierce determination that almost masks the fear beneath. As What Alice Found opens, she's decided to hit the open road with an envelope full of money lifted from her grocery-store job. She's headed to Florida to visit a friend at the University Of Miami, while nursing her own vague dreams of studying marine biology. Before she even hits warm weather, however, her car breaks down, leaving her to hitch a ride with Judith Ivey and Bill Raymond, a pair of mobile-home enthusiasts who give her, as flashbacks reveal, more comfort and kindness than she's known in years. The kindness never fades, but the comfort does. As the trip to Florida drags on, it becomes clear that Ivey's trysts with truckers pay for much of the gas, and pressure mounts for Grace to contribute, as well. Working on a truly low budget, Bell uses his limitations to the film's advantage. The grungy digital-video look, found locations, and constant buzz of highway traffic help create a genuine sense of peril, the kind of world in which one mistake can forever mar a life, if not end it. But What Alice Found is distinguished by its ability to find the complexities within the danger. An accomplished character actress and theater vet, Ivey makes her aging hooker at once maternal and repulsive, capable of pushing Grace into a compromised existence out of greed, but also out of a sense that she knows what's best for her young friend. Yet for all the film's soul-snaring traps, it's driven by a sense that Grace can decide what's best for herself, even if she doesn't know it yet. In the end, the camper-lot prostitution serves as trapping for a weirdly touching coming-of-age film that leaves its heroine sadder but wiser. It's probably no accident that What Alice Found echoes, and subtly mocks, the title of Go Ask Alice, that venerable piece of scare fiction about one good girl's descent into depravity. This film is a cautionary tale in its own way, but it's one that leaves the ambiguities of life intact.