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By Todd Garbarini

Some of the best literary achievements and their respective motion picture counterparts had their genesis in real-life. Robert Bloch made the grave-robber and necrophiliac Ed Gein into the motel manager Norman Bates in Psycho (1960); William Peter Blatty took the ostensibly possessed boy in Cottage City, MD and gave him the identity of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973); and Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek breathed celluloid life into Kit and Holly respectively in Badlands (1973), based upon Waste Land: The Savage Odyssey of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Smooth Talk, Joyce Chopra’s brilliant 1985 film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s equally excellent 1966 short story “Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going?", is no exception. While it may seem odd to begin this review of what is on the surface, and for all intents and purposes, a story of a teen-age girl’s sexual awakening,...