I recently overheard a fellow critic comparing Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” to Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” – and had to demur, because “Fish Tank” is actually a movie with a plot and emotional resonance.

Seeing “Fish Tank” (which opens in limited release Friday 1/15/10) and then watching a couple of upcoming Sundance films that are as aimless and thin as “Wendy and Lucy” may inspire me to write a future commentary about why people make movies about directionless lives on a downward spiral – what is it that makes them think that anyone wants to watch stories about clueless, helpless people with no future and no hope?

Yet “Fish Tank” overcomes that, thanks to the immediacy of Arnold’s filmmaking and the jittery vitality of the central performance by a young actress named Katie Jarvis.

Jarvis plays Mia, a 15-year-old British teen who essentially lives a life unsupervised by her party-girl mother (Kierston Wareing), whose only mothering consists of snarling at Mia and her younger sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), a foul-mouthed moppet.

Mia has few friends and tries to spend as little time as possible in the housing-project apartment where her family lives. Instead, she hangs out in an abandoned apartment, where she practices to be a hip-hop dancer, though her former friends (who practice hip-hop routines together) now treat her as an outcast.

The events of “Fish Tank” are minimal in some ways, huge in others. As Mia wanders the industrial landscape of her neighborhood, she spots a horse tied up in a junkyard and makes repeated attempts to set it free. Eventually, she is befriended by one of the teen-age boys who live in a trailer at the junkyard, a relationship that seems to hold some promise.

At home, she also seems to find a friend: Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mother’s new boyfriend. Where her mother treats Mia as an unwanted obligation, Connor seems actually to see her as a person, someone who might have thoughts and even dreams of her own.

But even as he moves in with the family, it eventually becomes clear that Connor has secrets of his own. He also is weak enough to let his relationship with Mia – more big brother than dad – turn dangerously flirtatious.

I guess I’m too firm a believer in plot (if not action) to embrace a film like “Wendy and Lucy” or Reichardt’s “Old Joy” or last year’s vastly overrated “Goodbye Solo.” While the story of “Fish Tank” is sketchy, it’s still a story – about a character going through changes, dealing with conflict, finding some form of resolution – instead of just struggling along and letting life happen. Life is not a movie; movies about life need something more than a string of events to be a film.

Arnold’s film is about the vulnerability of youth – even a youth as tough and street-hardened as Mia. It’s not because she’s a female but because she’s young and inexperienced, her only reference points being her own life and that of her mother, as well as the media she consumes. She still has no sense of just how complex – and, in some ways, how simple – life can be.

The title refers, it would seem, to Mia’s world, which she tries to escape at one point by answering an ad for dancers – hoping this will be her break in show-biz by giving her a shot at actually working in a hip-hop crew. Arnold’s point is that, to the fish, the tank appears to be the entire world.

Mia thinks she’s escaping at the end of “Fish Tank” – but she’s just changing tanks. That’s what makes this drama so heart-breaking.

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