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Dakota Fanning will turn 13 on Feb. 23, and she has a short answer for anyone who questions her decision to play a 1950s girl who gyrates in her underwear, wakes up as her naked father climbs into her bed, demands that a prepubescent boy expose himself to her in exchange for a kiss and, finally, is raped by a teenager who lures her with tickets to an Elvis concert: She's growing up. Get used to it.

Fanning, best known for leading roles in movies like "Dreamer" and "Charlotte's Web," now is starring in "Hounddog," an indie film that premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival and that has already won attention far out of proportion to its budget of less than $4 million.

CAROLYN KASTER/Associated Press (ENLARGE)
"I am getting older. ... And I will be playing different kinds of roles," says Dakota Fanning, 13 next month. "Hounddog" co-star Robin Wright Penn joins her at the film's Sundance debut.
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REACTION TO 'HOUNDDOG' Dakota Fanning's drama received a generally positive reaction from Monday night's audience, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. "We knew it was going to be big because of the controversy, and we heard random rumors in advance — and none of them were true," one moviegoer, Matt Sullivan, of Orange County, Calif., told the newspaper. The earliest review out, however, from trade paper Variety, was negative: " 'Hounddog' is an indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, biblical hash and thoroughly unpalatable spice," reviewer Todd McCarthy wrote. "The problem [is not the controversial rape] scene, which is as tastefully handled as it could be under the circumstances, but the fact that, after a reasonably atmospheric, if uneventful, first hour, the picture subsequently runs right off the rails." — Staff reports

When "Hounddog" was still shooting last summer near Wilmington, N.C., rumors about the rape scene kicked up a storm on the socially conservative end of the Web spectrum. Some suggested that Fanning was being exploited by the filmmakers, her parents and her agent. Hundreds signed a petition to persuade a local district attorney to prosecute the filmmakers under a law banning simulated sex with a minor. The furor hampered the production, and it continues on Fox News and on Web sites like A Minor Consideration (minorcon.org).

But the Wilmington district attorney, who was shown a cut of the film, said no crime was committed, and its writer and director, Deborah Kampmeier, said Fanning was treated more than appropriately: Though her character, Lewellen, disrobes under duress, for example, she is not seen nude, and Fanning was clothed during the production.

Fanning, for her part, says she is mystified by the outcry. Anyone who sees the film, she said recently, would understand that the rape scene wasn't the point of the movie. "That's not who Lewellen is," she said, sitting in her agent's office in Universal City. "Because that has happened to her, that doesn't define her. Because of this thing that has happened — that she did not ask for — she is labeled that, and it's her story to overcome that and to be a whole person again. There are so many children that this happens to, every second. That's the sad part. If anyone's talking about anything, that's what they should be talking about."

Her mother, Joy Fanning, waited outside, and her agent, Cindy Osbrink, sat in, but it was Fanning who fielded questions and who made clear that her choices were, well, just that. "You know, I'm an actress," she said. "It's what I want to do, it's what I've been so lucky to have done for almost seven years now. And I am getting older. ... And I will be playing different kinds of roles. ... And that's what I look forward to: getting to play new roles that aren't too old for me and aren't too young for me, that are just at the right time."

The story of "Hounddog" is about the cycle of violence: Nearly every major character in it is motherless, wounded, repressed and destructive (except for a farm hand/angel played by Atlanta actor Afemo Omilami). Lewellen's grandmother (Piper Laurie) violates her, too, if only with her eyes; her father (David Morse) has been abusing her more directly; and it appears likely that, if nothing changes, Lewellen will become an abuser, too.

In one scene, Lewellen sings and dances her best Elvis impression — horizontally, on her bed — upon learning that the singer is coming to town.

While she does, a teenage milkman is looking on hungrily. But to Kampmeier's mind, and more important, to Fanning's, Lewellen is as innocent as her already corrupted life can get.

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• Photos: Dakota Fanning at Sundance