Amusing 'Charlie Bartlett' lets audiences off too easy

Ritalin in the bag, dinner in the oven.

Love, Mom

So reads the note Charlie Bartlett's alcoholic mother leaves him one day on top of the grand piano in their palatial living room. And in that unfortunately rare moment, the movie "Charlie Bartlett" rises to its grand ambition: to take a bunch of memorable '80s teen movies, mash them together and soak the results in 21st century teen malaise.

At best, the film is charming and appealingly nostalgic, but it's also a trite teen comedy for Generation Y, in which the parties, drugs and sex are products of failed parenting. In the '80s, it seems, teenagers just did these things for fun.

In 2008, they've become symptoms.

Charlie, played by Anton Yelchin ("Alpha Dog"), is an obscenely wealthy teenager who is kicked out of his prep school for selling fake IDs, at which point his mother (Hope Davis) decides it's time for public school.

At first, Charlie is bullied and laughed at as he walks the halls in his prep-school blazer and khakis. (When asked by a particularly merciless bully if what he's carrying is a briefcase, Charlie politely responds, "I believe it's called an attaché case.")

Hoping to fit in, he hatches a scheme to sell prescription medication, drugs he tricks his family psychiatrist into prescribing him. And soon Charlie rises in the social stratosphere, prescribing psychostimulants to suicidal teens, arguing against young girls getting breast implants and generally advising a legion of socially adrift adolescents from a stall in the boy's bathroom. (And he's got designs on the daughter of the principal, played by Robert Downey Jr.)

Yelchin plays Charlie adequately, trying his darndest to channel the virtuosic mischief of Ferris Bueller. But the movie fails to see that the best teen comedies rarely set out in earnest to investigate or solve teen angst. Movies like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "The Breakfast Club" and "Say Anything" are more or less celebrations of that age bracket and all the mess that goes with it. "Charlie Bartlett" smartly modernizes the subgenre by looking at the relatively harsher issues plaguing teens these days, but it too often sermonizes. It's pat, but only occasionally sweet and funny, and it should have realized what it was onto with lines like "Ritalin in the bag, dinner in the oven."