“Miller’s Girl,” about a relationship that develops between a wise-beyond-her-years teenager and her intellectually undernourished teacher, feels like catnip for the circular discourse of Film Twitter, but it’s hard to tell where a study of post-#MeToo power dynamics will land with moviegoers in the real world.

Written, produced and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, the film is both impressively erudite and unrelentingly self-aware, a combination it bravely attempts but doesn’t quite fully balance. But Jenna Ortega’s movie-star confidence in the title role more than eclipses Martin Freeman’s shoe-leather character acting, a perhaps inevitable outcome given the age and gender politics exercised in its story — but not necessarily one that gets at something truly interesting.

Ortega (“Wednesday”) plays Cairo Sweet, a high school student living in a small Tennessee town while her absent lawyer parents travel the globe on unnamed business. Summed up with cheeky precision...