The travails of youthful pregnancy

You’re 16 years old. Your mother is a drug addict. One second she’s whacking you, the next second she’s comforting you. When you can no longer take how confused this makes you feel, you plan to run away. On top of this, you suspect you’re pregnant.

This happened to a real teenager, whose story is fictionalized in “Gimme Shelter,” a must-see 2013 movie, written and directed by Ron Krauss. In the film’s opening scene, 16-year-old Apple (Vanessa Hudgens) has decided to ask for help from her father, who she has never met.

She calls a cab from a phone booth in her building, asking to be driven to the address on the only letter she ever received from him. Inside the phone booth, she whispers over and over, “I’m okay...I can do this...I’m not scared.” 

Pulled out of the phone booth by her drug-addicted, abusive mother, June (Rosario Dawson), Apple is slugged to stop her from leaving. After Apple manages to get past June and into the waiting cab, June claws at the cab as it peels away, alternately threatening and entreating Apple to stay.

Apple’s father, Tom (Brendan Fraser) — who lives in a mansion paid for by his Wall Street job — has his wife take Apple to an abortion clinic. But Apple suddenly can’t go through with it.

Apple eventually enters a shelter for pregnant teens in New Jersey, which was run for 20 years by a former homeless teen, Kathy DiFiore (Ann Dowd), one of several called Several Sources Shelters. 

Fraser and James Earl Jones, who also appears in the movie, donated their salaries to the Several Sources Shelters.

What happens there is a miracle. Surrounded by girls in her situation — comforted by Father McCarthy (James Earl Jones), whom Apple alternately rejects and embraces — she gains a sense of belonging somewhere — to somebody — and begins to see her life as worthwhile. 

Kathy, Father McCarthy, and the other pregnant or parenting teens encourage her to look forward instead of backward.