film | Cafeteria food for thought

Wait, what's this: a teen flick actually concerned with important real-world issues affecting today's youth? With a climax set at a venue other than the big dance? That's not a vehicle for Amanda Duff or Hilary Bynes or some other interchangeable Nickelodeon starlet? Earth to director/co-writer Josh Stolberg — are you even trying to get your movie seen?

Earnestly ambitious but woefully unsure of itself, KIDS IN AMERICA deserves at least a little pat on the back for thinking outside the lunchbox. Inspired by real stories of adolescent activism (some of which are told in maddening first-person documentary accounts during the closing credits), the story involves a diverse batch of John Hughes-ian stereotypes updated for the new millennium — the stalwart rebel (Everwood's Gregory Smith), the asian tech-nerd (Emy Coligado), the flamboyant male dramatist (Alex Anfanger), the progressive newspaper editor (Stephanie Sherrin), the sassy black girl (Crystal Celeste Grant), etc. — collectively rallying against the discrimination and narrow-mindedness their high school passes off as administrative policy: suspending the president of the chastity club for suggesting that her classmates who do choose to have sex use protection, or penalizing a gay student for kissing his boyfriend in the hallway when every straight couple that makes out between periods goes unscolded.

It's a potent idea for a film, loaded with timely social application and scads of satirical promise. But Kids feels like its makers were afraid their concept was entirely too subversive and challenging for the mallrat target demographic, so they watered it down with broad comedy bits and one-note caricatures that inadvertently (and ironically) trivialize their whole freedom-of-expression point. A bland puppy-love connection between Smith and Sherrin inspires an overtly cutesy montage of the young actors recreating famous movie liplocks from Say Anything ..., Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Disney's Lady and the Tramp (arf!), while the rest of the cast is merely relegated to lively interpretations of familiar clichés. Worse, the priggish principal (Boston Legal's lovely Julie Bowen) this Breakfast Club version 2.0 combats is scripted as such a screechy cartoon character — most of the adult authority figures are, really — you wonder why she doesn't just drop an ACME safe on her pupils to put an end to their incessant protesting for good. Yeah, Kids in America's heart is in the right place, but all its other vital organs are out smoking behind the cafeteria dumpsters. C-