Plot
Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) is a misfit in the small town of Bodeen, Texas, with no sense of direction in her life. Her mother, Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden), a former beauty queen, pushes her to enter beauty pageants despite her lack of interest. Bliss and her best friend, Pash (Alia Shawkat), dream of escaping. Pash plans to attend an Ivy League school in a big city, but Bliss is uncertain as to what she wants for her future. During a shopping trip to Austin with her mother, Bliss encounters three roller derby team members. Intrigued, she and Pash attend a roller derby bout under the pretense of going to a football game, where they see the Holy Rollers defeat the Hurl Scouts, a perennially unsuccessful derby team. Bliss tells the Hurl Scouts that they are "her new heroes" and is suddenly drawn to the idea of being a roller derby skater herself when one of the Hurl Scouts, Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig) replies, "Well, put some skates on. Be your own hero."
Returning to Austin, Bliss lies about her age and tries out for the Hurl Scouts, discovering her natural skating abilities in the process. After realizing she needs to be ruthless in roller derby, Bliss sees she needs to take charge in other aspects of her life, revealed through various subplots. One involves Bliss' love interest, a lanky young rock guitarist and singer named Oliver (Landon Pigg) whom she meets via her exposure to roller derby. They enjoy a whirlwhind romance and an underwater lovemaking session before Oliver leaves for a tour, taking a T-shirt Bliss gave him to remember her by. She later finds a picture of him at a gig with another girl, who is wearing her t-shirt. She breaks up with him following his return, although he vehemently denies that anything happened.
Another sub-plot examines Bliss' relationship with her parents, a loving but controlling mother and an amiable but clueless father (Daniel Stern) who seldom opposes his wife's parental decisions. Although, eventually, Bliss' father convinces her mother to let Bliss out of a pageant (which is at the same time as the championship roller derby game) and convinces the Hurl Scouts to come get Bliss for the bout. Various other sub-plots include her relationship with Pash, and confrontations with a stuck up snob at school. Pash is fine with Bliss' new path, until she gets arrested with an open container of beer while she is waiting for Bliss, who has left to go find Oliver. Eventually, Pash gets together with their manager and forgives Bliss. The movie ends with the Hurl Scouts narrowly losing the championship match and everyone finally getting along; the team chants "We're number two!" which was the same thing they chanted when they lost their first match.
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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