PARK CITY, Utah — A swirl of angry, indignant, and purely speculative chatter has surrounded the film “Hounddog,” which depicts the rape of a girl played by the 12-year-old actress Dakota Fanning. When the film made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday night, moviegoers finally got to see what all the fuss was about — presuming they didn’t blink, that is.

The act, which takes place after a teenager lures Lewellen (Ms. Fanning) to a remote shack during a thunderstorm in the American South of the 1950s, is a barbarous one. But it barely lasts 10 seconds, and the camera doesn’t get anywhere near it. What the scene makes clear more than anything is that the filmmakers — writer/director Deborah Kampmeier in particular — are as horrified by the rape of a child as the rest of us, and for this reason, they rely primarily on two separate shots of Ms. Fanning’s face to register the devastating effect of the crime.

Ms. Fanning never shares the frame with the perpetrator; what makes the scene powerful is not prurient detail, but something else: first, an excruciating sense of you-know-what’s-coming, as the skies blacken and Lewellen is coerced into doing a striptease (filmed, disturbingly, from the aggressor’s point-of-view); then, the lingering low-angle shot of Lewellen’s face, lying sickly pallid in the mud, that closes the episode.

This is the most powerful scene in “Hounddog,” but even it shows what’s wrong with the film: Ms. Fanning and the weather are doing all the work.

It is not shelter from the storm, after all, that draws Lewellen to the shack, but a promised ticket to an Elvis Presley concert. She is obsessed with the King — her pelvis-swinging “Hound Dog” routine drives perverts wild, including her sexually abusive father (David Morse) — and is willing to do anything for a chance to see him.

Ms. Fanning, who turns 13 next month and is clearly eager to distance herself from light fare such as “Charlotte’s Web,” knows the glare of the limelight well, and delivers a high-key performance in this unbelievably demanding role. Her preternatural dramatic gifts, even if she seems a bit too conscious of them, are on full display here. But it is too much to ask of Ms. Fanning, as it would be of anyone, to hold up “Hounddog,” a forced fable of soulful redemption with an overdeveloped taste for Southern cliché.

A blossoming but sin-tainted romance opens the film, as Lewellen flirts confidently with her friend Buddy (Cody Hanford) in a briar patch. He wants to kiss her; she wants him to drop his pants. The source of her sexual precociousness is clear the moment she goes home to her father, a leering creep who handles his coltish daughter with a discomfiting familiarity.

There’s an off-putting theatrical quality to “Hounddog,” which is staged against a hastily assembled backdrop of Flannery O’Connor moods and places. Characters enter the action arbitrarily, as if wandering onstage, and the exchanges that take place in wooded groves and cramped inner quarters lack the intimacy of the best smalltown dramas. Of course, the dialogue doesn’t help. As Lewellen’s father’s girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn) ponders whether to adopt the young girl, she considers the advice of a concerned neighbor: “Maybe you’d finally be putting your arms around yourself the way your mamma never could.”

This suggestion comes from Charles (Afemo Omilami), the wise black man next door and walking cliché. Charles makes medicine out of snake venom, so naturally he knows how to take the poison inside people and put that to good use as well. He also, half a century before cell phones, pops up out of nowhere to deal with all cottonmouth-related emergencies.

Charles suggests Lewellen find solace in the blues, which the film presents as secular music. Religion in this version of the South is white and clueless, including Lewellen’s fanatical aunt (Piper Laurie) and a young clergyman who preaches glibly against the sins of rock ‘n’ roll.

The lightning bolt that strikes Lewellen’s father early in the film and turns him into even more of a neanderthal couldn’t have been a happy accident. Yet the film steers clear of divinity and instead urges Lewellen to use music to find salvation in her soul. If people talked — or thought — that way in the South 50 years ago, may the 12-bar blues strike me down.