I hope old Hollywood and what's become the new Hollywood, namely the Sundance Film Festival, haven't yet established that the angst of suburban high school life really is a metaphor for all those life lessons they want to share with us. Rocket Science is one more in a long line of sensitive and not-so-sensitive teen-age movies. Surprisingly, this one is pretty good. On the other hand, if you're not prepared early on to recognize low-key exaggeration to achieve humor and make a point ("Wait a minute, why didn't Hal just point to the pizza?") you might leave the theater scratching your head.

Hal is Hal Hefner (Reese Thompson), a schlumping, unhappy, shy high school student with a stutter. The stutter, in fact, is more like a series of strangled gargles. He knows the answers; he has ideas...and he simply can't get them out. When the captain of the debating team, Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) recruits him to be her partner, it's because, she says, she can see his potential. Turns out she has some other, not so altruistic, motives. Hal first finds infatuation and what he thinks is love for this cute, smart high school star. He decides he'll join the debate team, even though he has never been able to get more than a sentence or two out of his mouth, because Ginny wants him to. Hal also has to deal with an older brother who bullies and steals, the break-up of his parents' marriage, and his mother taking up with the father of a schoolmate. Through it all, Hal perseveres. Those who think this movie will be a series of crude jokes and high school hormone scenes will be disappointed. Of course, those who think Hal will overcome that strangulating stammer, will win Ginny's heart and the two will face a tense debating contest which will leave them state champs...are going to be disappointed, too.

What Hal faces is a series of struggles and challenges, keyed to the awful inexperience and misunderstandings of adolescence. The director and writer, Jeffrey Blitz, who gave us the documentary Spellbound, sets up Hal and his world as a series of situations for Hal to deal with. There is no self-pity from Hal. As the movie progresses we figure out that Hal is not going to have an epiphany of speech or love, but that he's going to manage, even if just barely at times. Along the way we can enjoy what Blitz gives Hal...a high school speech counselor who only knows about hyper-active kids; Hal's continuing battle to deal with the choice of pizza or fish in the cafeteria; Ginny Ryerson's neighbors, a couple who work through their marriage issues with a cello, a piano and a copy of the illustrated Kama Sutra; the debate technique of "spreading," or cramming a breathless, fast-talking debate position into 30 seconds (ten if you're responding). I hope this is a Blitz invention. It causes some awe-inspiring situations...when a debater goes dry, when Hal tries, when Ginny wows 'em...but it seems as unnatural a part of real debate technique as miniature poodles are to dogs.

And at the close? "Love shouldn't be as complicated as rocket science," Hal says to his father. Most of us over the age of 30 have figured out that it shouldn't be, but usually is. Rocket Science is a good-natured, good-humored movie about a kid with a stammer who is willing to try for the sake of love. Is it a realistic slice of high school life? I wouldn't know. I tried my best to forget my high school years as quickly as I could.

For those who enjoy their high school movies filled with double-dealing, back-stabbing, uneasy laughter and wickedly sharp irony, you can't do better than Alexander Payne's black comedy, Election. Reese Witherspoon's over-achieving Tracy Flick would leave Ginny Ryerson with the stammer and Hal Hefner nothing but a moist lump in the janitor's closet.

I'm surprised that this film elicits so many negative reviews here. I enjoyed reading the rant by the guy who spells cello "chello." I think that pretty much explains it. Literacy will be required to appreciate this movie.

This has to be the best dialog in any film ever made with a stutterer as a central character.

I found the performances letter-perfect; not a false note anywhere. This is a movie where even the bit parts are played by well-cast actors, not producers' pretty boyfriends or girlfriends. I loved the girl in the washroom with the nosebleed, for example. Perfect.

Rushmore did not come to mind while I watched this film, nor did any of the other "quirky" films named here by other reviewers. But I did think of it as a companion piece to "Welcome to the Dollhouse." Both set in NJ, and both with central characters at the bottom of their school social ranking, and coping with their realities better than one would think.

I particularly liked the relationship between adults and kids in this film. The adults (parents and teachers) are wise about the kids, and the kids are just as wise about the adults. The tone was just right.