A naive, hyper-sexualized Southern “wild child” makes an imprint on the pre-war Southern family where she comes to work and a son of the family comes of age in “Rambling Rose,” a florid, folksy and comically sexual period piece that made Laura Dern a movie star.

It’s “Baby Doll” meets “The Reivers,” if you can imagine that, a dark comedy about feminine sexuality and men bowled over by it as imagined by William Faulkner and drawled with a lurid, amused wink by Tennessee Williams.

Scripted by a celebrated screenwriter (“Little Big Man”) and fiction writer now considered “The Lost Novelist,” sentimentalized by a director then only known for the teen comedies “Valley Girl” and “Real Genius” and sexed-up by an actress looking to break free of being known as the daughter of a famous actor and actress, “Rambling Rose” was a picture out of its time in its time.

And now?

Few male fiction writers would confidently wade into the psychology of an orphaned young woman careening through, coupling and captivating every male within her sight line in 1930s Glenville, Georgia, the fictional stomping grounds of writer Calder Willingham. Even doctors didn’t toss around “nymphomaniac” much back then. And in the 35 years since the movie based on a 1972 novel came out, the simplistic, judgement-tainted word’s been all but banished from the language.

A scene with Rose allowing a “curious” and insistent-to-the-point-of-creepy boy (Lukas Haas of “Witness”) do a lot more than “cop a feel” might be picketed today, and was censored out of British prints for “child exploitation” reasons even back then.

A fiftyish father (Robert Duvall) extravagantly complimenting the new maid/nanny the family insists on treating like family might cross the line to “icky” with present day viewers.

“Rosebud, I swear to God you are as graceful as a capital letter ‘S!'”

And having the overripe girl less than half his age throw herself at the patriarchal Georgia hotel owner is as eyeroll worthy as this one-Black-face-in-town version of the Old South so many filmmakers and novelists who inspire them unthinkingly serve up.

But Dern, vamping and drawling and trying and failing at being “innocent” and not in control of her hormones at every turn, is a stitch.

“I have robbed a CRADLE and fell into HELL!”

Paired up with Dianne Ladd, her mother playing the mostly deaf proto-feminist, ahead-of-her-time tolerant matriarch of the house, they serve up giggles most every scene together. Menfolk from Daddy (Duvall) to the sheriff to a doctor (Kevin Conway) get put in their sexist patriarchal places by a flake defending a defiantly promiscuous girl in search of “love.”

“What you don’t understand is, it’s positive energy on this planet. It’s what we do with (sex) that makes it negative!”

Duvall finds a new playfully blustering gear to show off.

“I am STANDING at Thermopylae,” he bellows to Rose, whom he wants to fire, and his wife and kids who won’t have it. Dern and Ladd and Duvall are what stick in the memory with this film, and that phrase became my critic’s credo after seeing it. Willingham, who scripted “The Graduate,” “Thieves Like Us” and “One-Eyed Jacks,” had a way with a turn of phrase.

The film drags in the latter acts as director Martha Coolidge surfs the sentimentality and lets our tale wander from climax to anti-climax. Elmer Bernstein’s “Dixie” accented score grates as much as John Heard‘s — playing the adult version of the son who never got over his Rose-crush — cloying and drawled voice over narration about the “Dixie” he remembers.

But those quibbles and legitimate gripes aside, the lead performances overwhelm the movie’s shortcomings in the memory.

Dern and her mother were both honored with Oscar nominations — the daughter for Best Actress, her mother for Best Supporing Actress, the only time that’s ever-happened — and the film won Best Picture and Best Director at that year’s Independent Spirit Awards.

Dern was already almost-famous, owing to supporting work in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Hearts” and in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Mask.” But she didn’t land the lead in “Silence of the Lambs” because she wasn’t a “name” the studio could sell the film with. That changed with “Rambling Rose” and the just as sexually rambunctious “Citizen Ruth” shortly afterward.

Her career has been “storied” ever since, with an Oscar (for “Marriage Story”), another nomination (“Wild”), an Emmy for “Big Little Lies” and more honors deserved. She and her just-passed mother co-wrote one of the most adorable autobiographies ever.

And if the film that “launched” her isn’t ageing like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Dern’s performance in it is. She makes “Rambling Rose” an anti-heroine ahead of her time in a performance so fearlessly out there that it invites nervous belly laughs that decades of changing attitudes, mores and political correctness cannot dim.

Rating: R, fisticuffs, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Laura Dern, Robert Duvall, Dianne Ladd, John Heard and Lukas Haas.

Credits: Directed by Martha Coolidge, scripted by Calder Willingham, adapted from his novel. A Carolco, Seven Arts/New Line release on Pluto and other streamers.

Running time: 1:52