Early in the film, the youngest Lisbon sister, Cecilia (Hanna Hall), slits her wrists in the bathtub. She is saved, and a doctor asks her why she did it, since she didn't know anything about life's pain and suffering. She replies, "You obviously have never been a 13 year old girl." That is the most important line of the film, for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is that this film does not attempt to explain why Cecilia and her four sisters committed suicide, because, as the film ably demonstrates, there is no real way of knowing.

Also among them is that the story is not really the story of the five Lisbon sisters. It is the story of several neighborhood boys who became infatuated with them in the short period of time between the youngest sister's suicide and their group suicide. The story is told in their words and through their eyes. This seemingly strange choice of narrators accentuates the central point of the film, that nobody really knows why the girls did it. These four confused, hormonally challenged boys understood about as well and as poorly as anyone else. The difference is that, in the time before the girls' deaths, the boys idealized the sisters. The deaths had such an impact on them that they were still trying to figure it out, 25 years later.

The plot is pretty simple. Cecilia attempts suicide. The doctors and parents tear at their hair and ask themselves, "why?" The parents are instructed to let their children interact with boys their own age. At a party thrown by the parents, where we are introduced to the five boys, Cecilia quietly slips away and jumps to her death. Flash forward two months. The other four girls return to school, seemingly wrapped up in their own world. This reminded me of a close friend's sisters, who spent so much time together and were so close that they finished each other's sentences. Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the school stud, takes an interest in Lux (Kirsten Dunst), the second youngest and most beautiful sister. She ignores him at first, but he persists. He is infatuated with her, something that he had not yet experienced with the other girls who idolize him. Maybe it's because he has to work at it with her. He convinces her parents to allow him to take her to the Homecoming dance, provided he finds dates for the other three sisters. At the dance, they slip away and make love in the football field. For some reason, which he is not able to explain, even 25 years later, he leaves her asleep on the field and never talks to her again. She wakes up alone, long after he curfew, and returns home to frantic parents who overreact and place the girls under virtual house arrest. Several weeks later they are dead.

The film is kind to all its inhabitants. Trip Fontaine, the boy who leaves Lux, admits that he doesn't know why he did it. He reminded me of what it was like to be awkward and sixteen, knowing that you are supposed to pursue girls, creating idealized fantasies of them that no woman could ever live up to. So he got what he was after, and it frightened him, or disgusted him, or some reaction that made him run. At sixteen, what could he know of first-time sex, where it never works as well or as beautifully as in the movies? Add to this that he was raised to idolize girls, while at the same time to scorn girls who gave in. It's the double standard of our society's sexual relations.

Lux's response is to have sex with as many people as she can. Why does she do it? There are hints given. She asks one boy if he thinks what they did was dirty. Perhaps she is as confused as Trip about their encounter. Perhaps she feels that she is to blame. She was infatuated with Trip too, and maybe she thinks that sex is the way to attract men. Keep in mind that she is just 14. How else could she react?

The parents, played by James Woods and Kathleen Turner who are the apparent reason for the girls' suicide, are sympathetic characters. They are strict, but so are so many other parents whose kids don't kill themselves. They lost a child, and if they overreacted to Lux's lateness, can you really blame them? They had already lost Cecilia, and it looked like they were might lose Lux. Their response was to keep them as close as possible. An objective look at their "rules" reveals that they were really not that much worse than other parents.

All of this underscores the fact that nobody will ever really know why they did it. The four boys who serve as narrators spent the rest of their lives trying to figure it out, and they never will. Perhaps if they had gotten to know the real girls better, they would not have their idealized fantasies of them. Of course, that could be said for everyone in the film.