Film of the week: Charlie Bartlett

CHARLIE BARTLETT (15)

Director: Jon Poll
Running time: 97 minutes

***

LIKE its hero, Charlie Bartlett is keen to please, but like the other teenagers in this ferociously quirky flick, Charlie Bartlett is a movie in search of an identity, still not quite sure what sort of high-school picture it wants to be when it grows up.

When poor little rich boy Charlie (Anton Yelchin) gets kicked out of his umpteenth private school for making fake IDs, his over-medicated mother (Hope Davis) signs him up for the local high school as a last resort piece of tough love. On his first day, he is challenged by Bivens (Tyler Hilton), a quiffed-up bully who looks like the lost love child of Morrissey and Vanilla Ice. "So are you a total faggot or what?" he demands. "Is that a rhetorical question?" queries our hero, earning himself an immediate dunking in the boys' toilet.

However, Charlie's mild-mannered geniality serves him well as he navigates his new school's hazardous social ecosystem, and his first step is to present his chief tormentor with a proposition. He'll supply a steady stream of chemical cheer, and Bivens will sell them on to the kids. And there's a bonus: along with the Ritalin and Prozac, Charlie will offer psychological advice in the boys' loos, based on his years in therapy.

Soon the entire student population is lining up to score some pharmaceuticals and benefit from Charlie's psychological prowess. Toughs are tamed, depressives are uplifted, the school good-time girl finds a steady boyfriend, and Charlie the loser suddenly becomes a winner.

"Bringing psychiatric drugs and teenagers together is like opening a lemonade stand in the desert," he cracks, and it's only thanks to Yelchin's likeability that we don't wish his head was back stuck down that boys' toilet.

Like most heroes of wannabe teen comedies, Charlie isn't a student of any school we might recognise. He's actually from the Risky Business School for Loveable Rebels, where he learns to make his own rules, dress with distinction (alumnus Ferris Bueller's leopard waistcoat is still the talk of the school corridors) and graduate after exhibiting a heart the size of a disabled toilet.

Before you can say benzodiazepine, Charlie is the most popular kid in class, and as well as pulling in cash, he's also reeling in the principal's daughter Susan (Kat Dennings). This move sets him at odds with her resentful dad, although unfortunately the film's target audience probably won't notice this as being the film's best gag. Playing the harried authority figure of all authority figures is Robert Downey Jr, who was once the ultimate teen bad boy in films such as Less Than Zero and The Pick-Up Artist, before he went on to become even better known for mugshots and rehab.

Indeed, Charlie Bartlett feels like an old person's nostalgic creation of how young people live. A birthday party where Charlie tastefully loses his virginity then gallantly announces it to the entire room looks as if it was made out of old Debbie Gibson videos, while Charlie acts like Holden Caulfield without the hunting cap, cynicism, archness or ennui.

In any case, by this point the movie has painted itself into a bit of a corner, because a student neuropsychopharmacologist illegally selling sedatives to his classmates isn't going to be allowed to ride off happily into the sunset without some sort of retribution. So the film essentially ends around here, and what follows is a sentimental and tatty compromise between an entertaining story of a kid who can help everyone but himself, and a thin teen movie where the misfit realises that, hey, "everyone's an insecure nerd" – a message that seems straight out of a Hannah Montana episode.

Sincere and earnest to near-carcinogenic levels, Charlie Bartlett is no dud, but it does feel awfully like Ferris Bueller's Off Day. Despite its heavily Ritalined spin on the usual teen tropes, the movie seems more comfortable shaping tributes to older high school movies such as My Bodyguard, Rushmore and Pretty In Pink. Isn't this rather ironic for a film that tub-thumps that it's OK just to be yourself?

Despite beyond-the-call performances from some of the leads, and an initially intriguing premise, nearly every aspect of Charlie Bartlett, from the punchlines to the plotline, is only moderately rewarding at best. This is less a fully realised movie, and more like a delivery system for an eventual domination of the T-shirt aisle in HMV.

• On general release from Friday