By RICHARD CORLISS

WHEN LOVE ISN'T ENOUGH

Should the state take children from a caring, mixed-up mom?

Boys town is not the movie to see for the inside view on child- welfare problems. Ladybird, Ladybird is. This English drama about a worst-case child-custody scenario may show those who make social policy how hard it is to legislate love, lust, neglect, despair and other real-family values. Ken Loach's film, written by Rona Munro and based on a true story, horrifies and edifies in equal measure.

Maggie Conlon (Crissy Rock) is a working-class mess. She has had four children by four men. She does care for her kids and tries her best to take care of them, but she has also lived with a man who beat her in front of her children. ("He never, ever touched the kids," she says defensively. "You gotta give him that.") Once, when she and her brood were staying in a welfare hotel, she locked them inside the flat and went to a pub; there was a fire, and the children were injured. Social Services removed them to foster homes.

Maggie catches a break when she meets Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a gentle Paraguayan refugee. But as they try to create their own family, Maggie's past haunts them. So does her bad temper. Brutalized as a child, she has a vicious streak and a suspicion of Jorge's goodness. Any man who doesn't strike her- and strike out at the system that she believes oppresses her-well, he can't be a real man, can he? Heroically, Jorge endures Maggie's depressions, rages and physical abuse. All he can do is love her.

All Maggie can do for her children is love them-from a distance. Assuming that Jorge is another of Maggie's brutal mates, the welfare state abducts their first child from their home and their second child straight from the maternity ward. By now Maggie is afraid to let her babies out of her sight, or even out of her body. "No!" she screams as she goes through labor. "It's stayin' where it is!"

Ladybird, Ladybird opens one naked wound of the welfare dilemma. Should a loving mother be allowed to raise her children? But of course. And what if she is unable to protect them from her crippling weaknesses? Motherhood is a craft as well as a passion; it requires competence, ingenuity, common sense. "Children need more than love," a welfare worker testifies at one of Maggie's humiliating hearings. "They need support, and they need stability." In other words, the parent can't also be a child.

A social tract, however, can also be a movie. Ladybird, Ladybird is a good one-more painful to watch than any slasher film, because its emotional violence literally hits home. And however close Jorge comes to being fitted for the halo worn in Boys Town by Spencer Tracy's Father Flanagan, the new film rarely sentimentalizes its scorching situations.

That is due largely to Rock's fine ferocity. A Liverpool club comic who never acted before, but who has survived an abusive marriage, Rock asks for no quarter and gives none. Here is a mother, she says, dishing it out and taking it. Now you decide what to do with Maggie, and the millions of women like her, in England, America and around the world.

SLACK JAWING

Sensitive youth seeks sensible woman. Object: talk, talk, talk Can anything be more annoying than the prattle of an insensitive guy trying to impress a woman? Yes: the prattle of a sensitive guy. Surely you've overheard this banter in parks and restaurants. The fellow pontificates on the mystery of love, quotes from the Lake poets, shares the most fragile intimacies. And lurking inside his earnestness is this tacit question: "So-now that I've proved what a refined soul I am-can we have sex?"

In Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, two young people meet on a train, strike up a conversation and, for the rest of the movie, never stop talking. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is American, Celine (Julie Delpy) is French, and the setting is Vienna on a sweet June night. But the chat is universal. Jesse and Celine while, and wile, away the night declaiming every cool thing they ever heard, every reeeeeally deep notion that ever crossed their minds. He: "Love is the escape for two people who don't know how to be alone." She: "If there's a God in the world, it's not in you, or me, but in the space in between ... in trying to connect." He: "Everyone's been having this conversation forever." She: "And nobody's come up with the answer."

Neither has Linklater. His Slacker and Dazed and Confused had huge casts, rambling narratives and a notion of film as a grab bag of blasa attitude and barroom philosophizing. It's all very '90s. Before Sunrise, on the other hand, seems instantly dated. This two-character talkfest, a kind of Eric Rohmer meets Harry meets Sally, wins points for daring to be a love story-how defiantly unhip is that?-and is presumably meant as sensitivity training for 20-year-olds. But in reaching for winsome charm, the film falls flat. This meeting of bright minds often plays like desperate showing-off.

Still, it may have some future utility. In olden days, as a token of his romantic seriousness, a gent used to give his lady a copy of Kahlil Gibran's profoundly woozy The Prophet. Perhaps the gift of a videocassette of Before Sunrise will offer a similar opportunity for '90s fellows too clever to announce that they're on the make.