It’s title an obvious reference to what Alice found when she impulsively went through the looking glass, A. Dean Bell’s new film is a slice of life for a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, for which she is not quite ready. Unlike her best friend, who has recently left their New Hampshire town to start college in Florida, Alice’s prospects are zeroing in on a permanent job at the local mini-mart. In a screenplay and performances that provide a keen, sometimes stinging, view on coping with what life deals out and the all too human frailties that flesh is heir to, Alice’s adventures teach her some tough and tender life lessons.

At the outset, Alice hits the highway after quarreling with her mother. Feeling the exhilaration of the road, and pushing aside the reality that she’s on the lamb for petty theft from her job, in a beat up car, with only the thinnest of plans for what she will do when she reaches Florida, the road beckons. Her spontaneous odyssey quickly hits a detour as the road and her simplistic plan to become a marine biologist meet some unexpected curves. She finds herself on an alternate route, a slow whirlwind by-pass on the path to growing up.

With the naïveté of youth, she’s not fretting over possible consequences, but simply taking the path of least resistance. That path crosses Sandra and Bill’s at a highway rest stop not too far from home.

Judith Ivey is flawless as Sandra. She’s a middle age down-home girl, a bit frayed around the edges, but optimistic and worldly wise. She offers Alice a ride to Florida in their big self-contained RV following a menacing highway encounter that leaves Alice’s car undrivable. The road seems to be a way of life for Sandra and Bill. Twice divorced, Sandra takes Alice grocery shopping for "anything, as long as it goes in the microwave," and then for some sexier new clothes, treating her almost like a daughter. How Bill and Sandra pay the bills soon becomes apparent, but Alice assesses her options and decides to stay, putting off her Florida destination just a little. These small choices are at the heart of this well balanced, thoughtful film. It probes the essence of the things we choose, the things we get stuck with, and how to notice the difference while we still have time to alter the course.

The grainy look of digital video is a good fit for the wide open yet claustrophobic sense of life from the window of an RV. Emily Grace delivers a fine performance as Alice, not too trusting, a little awkward but pretty and a refreshing change from the cookie cutter glamour girls in far too many films. The movie belongs to Grace and Ivey with Bill Raymond as Sandra’s stoic but perhaps combustible husband, Bill, providing needed counterbalance. Writer-director Bell nicely liberates the story from what might have been intolerably bleak with an honest and effective ending.