Former Disney star Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) has graduated to more serious subject matter in writer/director Ron Krauss’ Gimme Shelter, due in theaters in 2012 from Columbia Pictures. Rosario Dawson and James Earl Jones both play significant roles in the film’s story.

Dawson will star as June Bailey, the mother of Hudgens’ character, while Jones will play a character named Father McCarthy. The film also stars Brendan Fraser as the father of Hudgens’ character, Jack Bailey.

In Gimme Shelter, Hudgens plays a character named Agnes “Apple” Bailey, and the plot goes a little something like this:

This street-wise, 16 year old girl who calls herself Apple has never had an easy life. Her mother is a junkie and prostitute, is verbally and physically abusive, and is grooming her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Apple knows the streets, alleys and motels like the back of her hand but wants more from her life. She possesses a tenacious, tough, indomitable spirit, and will not surrender to fate. Apple runs away from her mother and tracks down her father whom she has never known, as he was only 19 himself when he got Apple’s mother pregnant. Apple begs her now Wall Street Broker father to take her in.

I find it very interesting that the role of Apple’s junkie-prostitute mother was given to an Afro-Latina and the role of her Wall Street broker father just happens to be Caucasian.

I SMDH at you Hollywood.