There’s a noble tradition in the acting profession, and the indie cinema. When the work isn’t there, you create something for yourself worth starring in. It’s how Billy Bob Thornton and others made their own “big break.”

There’s also a well-established route for actresses finally breaking through, getting themselves “taken seriously” by seriously dressing down for a part. Ask Charlize Theron what “Monster” did for her.

But both of these time-honored traditions are strained and stained in whatever the hell nobody’s-idea-of-struggling Nicola Peltz Beckham thought she was doing with “Lola.”

It’s a gritty and lowdown “showcase” in slumming, an attempt at a sort of Riley Keough re-invention for the well-heeled/married-well “Bates Motel” alumna. She wrote, directed and stars in this sordid and misshapen star vehicle about a small town Texas teen struggling to get her and her very young and feminine kid brother out of the hellhouse they’re being raised in.

Bonus points for casting indie icon Virginia Madsen as the monstrous mother who drinks, smokes and takes up with whatever rapist will have her as she ignores and berates stripper Lola and “home schools” a kid (Luke David Blumm) she will never understand.

It’s such a shame your Dad didn’t take you with him when he left!”

Everything else, from the nightly stripper make-up ritual to the “back room” where extra cash is collected for sex work — “Do you party, Angel?” — to the no-good high school boyfriend (Richie Merritt) she keeps around to keep her in drugs, to the Black best friend (Raven Goodwin) at the convenience store where they work and which Lola steals from, to an unplanned pregnancy is straight-up formula, the sort of down-market Southern Gothic downmarket Tennessee Williams wallow we saw in 174 indie films that preceded it.

“I’ve always thought I needed a reason to be good,” Lola narrates in the film’s opening. “But what does ‘being good’ even mean?”

Judging from Peltz Beckham’s writing her way through struggle and death and self-help group and strip club cliches, and donning all that makeup to act “cheap,” she never did figure that out.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex and profanity

Cast: Nicolas Peltz Beckham, Raven Goodwin, Richie Merritt, Luke David Blumm and Virginia Madsen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicolas Peltz Beckham. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:23