Witherspoon's brave, uncompromising performance a transformational joy in 'Wild'

Bloody her toes. Dirty her hair.

Cover her body with scabs and bruises.

Dress her in grungy hoodies, stenchy jeans and foul-smelling T-shirts.

It doesn't matter.

Reese Witherspoon remains so gol-darned adorable, you instinctively want to protect her, to give her a hug and reassure her that things will be all right, even if you're not sure they can be.

In "Wild," Jean-Marc Vallee's raw and noble tale of a young woman's quest for personal redemption, Witherspoon's vulnerability and charisma prove to be essential for this fact-based drama to succeed.

We must love and embrace her character, because she's so flawed and unattractive in her choices and behavior that it would be too easy for us to simply dislike and dismiss her.

Watch Witherspoon's performance closely. She floods her character with so much loss and pain and confusion and determination that she renders us as breathless as she is after climbing a mountain.

"Wild," based on Cheryl Strayed's (born Cheryl Nyland) 2012 account of her 1995, 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, begins with Strayed (Witherspoon) shouting foul words into a canyon after painfully removing a bloodied nail from her big toe.

Then, in this adaptation by British writer Nick "About a Boy" Hornby, "Wild" launches into a kaleidoscopic, chronologically scattered narrative that slowly reveals Strayed's story, and why she decides to take a grueling journey through deserts and snow with little understanding of its challenges.

We learn how Strayed's loving, but spouse-abused mother Bobbi (Laura Dern, in earth-mother mode) died of lung cancer at 45, catapulting her despondent 22-year-old daughter into heroin addiction and self-destructive, casual sex with any man who wants her.

Her marriage falls apart.

She falls apart.

Yet, something propels Strayed to hike the Pacific Crest Trail with a crushingly heavy backpack dubbed "the monster," leaving segments of song lyrics and poems at stations along the way.

Maybe, she hopes, she can find forgiveness.

Hornby wisely moves Bobbi's horrific death from the beginning of Strayed's book and plants it deep into the screenplay, preserving Strayed's motivations as a mystery to be later revealed.

Jean-Marc Vallee, whose "Dallas Buyers Club" won Oscars for actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, clearly has a knack for handling unlikeable protagonists.

He also meets the challenge of the story's risky mix of jumbled time elements, using costuming, hairstyles and makeup to instantly identify where we are on the calendar.

(Plying the soundtrack with vintage Simon & Garfunkel songs proves slightly annoying and deceptively tied to an earlier generation than 1995.)

Importantly, neither Vallee nor Witherspoon sugarcoat Strayed as most Hollywood biopics tend to do with too-human protagonists.

Witherspoon, executing the most difficult and nuanced role of her impressive career to date, shows us the warts along with the wounds as she struggles through 94 days of heat, cold, starvation and dehydration, using her all-encompassing will to succeed as Strayed's most attractive personal quality.

"Wild" projects such realism that we instantly pick up on her palpable fear every time she confronts a man on the trail. Each could be a sexual predator: the farmer (W. Earl Brown) who offers her whiskey, a skinny-dipping fellow hiker (Kevin Rankin), two hunters with hungry eyes, even a hobo magazine writer (Mo McRae) who remarks that Strayed sure sounds like a feminist!

For the first time in my reviewing career, a movie has placed me into the head of a strong female character so well that my stomach knotted up each time a male crossed Strayed's path. Is he a good guy? Or someone who calculates the odds of taking advantage of the situation?

This is why "Wild" ranks as one of the better movies of 2014, despite an abrupt ending. It may be directed and written by men, but its source material and leading lady make it one of the most honest women's dramas I've ever seen.

“Wild”

★ ★ ★ ½

Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Kevin Rankin, W. Earl Brown, Mo McRae

Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallee

Other: A 20th Century Fox release. Rated R for drug use, language, nudity, sexual situations. 115 minutes.