The portrait “Laggies” draws of a young woman stalled on the edge of adulthood is so familiar by now that you may approach it with impatience. We understand, you’re having trouble growing up. Get on with it, and while you’re doing so, amuse us.
Luckily, the movie does a pretty good job at that while keeping things overly safe for its hapless heroine, Megan, played by Keira Knightley. I confess to some cognitive dissonance, since Megan is supposed to be an average Middle American schlump and there is nothing remotely average about Knightley. In movies like “Atonement” or “Pride & Prejudice,” the star’s fashion-model gawgeousness doesn’t distract from her sizable acting skills so much as complement them. In “Laggies” she comes across as
a gazelle plonked down in a field of domesticated cattle.
Megan’s high school friends have moved on to marriages and children, and the script by Andrea Seigel can barely hold back a sneer at their complacency. Megan, by contrast, is drifting through life with a degree but no job, and Knightley’s body language ingeniously suggests a teenager forcibly frog-marched into maturity. When longtime boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes marriage — at one of their friends’ weddings, no less — Megan freaks and heads for the hills.
Said hills being the home of Annika (Chlöe Grace Moretz), a high schooler Megan meets outside a convenience store while the girl and her friends are trolling for someone to buy them beer. You can tell by the way Megan expertly flips one of the kids’ skateboards that she wants back into that life — the emotions were so vibrant, you knew who the enemies were — and there’s real comedy in the way the heroine falls back into the melodramas of adolescence while standing appalled just outside them. “I’ll always love Neil Young,” she tells a girl with an iPod at a party. “I’ve just discovered him!” is the response.
Call it The Big Sleepover, in which Megan moves into Annika’s bedroom while telling her fiance and friends she’s off at a career seminar. In an odd way, director Lynn Shelton has fashioned a more realistic take on such multiplex fantasy bubbles as “17 Again” and “13 Going on 30,” done Sundance-style instead of with the usual studio dundering. But there are enough indie clichés to blunt this movie’s edge, including Sam Rockwell as Annika’s dad Craig, conveniently single and conveniently cute as hell.
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Shelton has a knack for throwing good actors into emotional tangles and letting them wing their way out. It’s an approach that has yielded the gold of “Your Sister’s Sister” (2011) and the lead sinker of last year’s “Touchy Feely.” Normally she works from her own scripts with an eye to creative improvisation, but that’s not the case here, and “Laggies” — the title, I’m guessing, refers to those who lag behind their peers — feels second-guessed and conventional.
The best moments can be found in the performances: Knightley at times hilariously portraying a teenage klutz marooned in a graceful body, Rockwell as a divorcé on the edge of permanent sourness. (He glances at his daughter’s new friend and dryly remarks, “high school students are looking rougher and rougher these days.”) Moretz is affecting but working below her skill set as a girl with the usual boatload of anxieties; Kaitlyn Dever (“Men, Women & Children,” TV’s “Last Man Standing”) steals every scene she’s in as Annika’s tart-tongued best friend.
An example of the way “Laggies” cuts the corners of its observations is Megan’s pal Allison, played by the fine comic actress Ellie Kemper (“Bridesmaids”) as a two-dimensional shrew. The heroine’s choices are a little too easy throughout, no more so than in Rockwell’s character. While the actor’s as rudely charming as ever and he and Knightley are excellent company, Craig’s a writer’s conceit and an unnecessary one. He’s a life preserver thrown to a woman who really needs to learn to swim on her own.
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Watch the film’s trailer:
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Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.