“Popular Theory” is a limp effort to reclaim the comic possibilities of “child genius” from TV (“Young Sheldon”) that makes one wish they’d just left this genre to the boob tube.

It’s about a high school upperclasswoman who is all of 13, and who decides that “popularity” as it is conceived in adoloscence might be chemical, and something she can manipulate in a lab experiment.

Sophia Reid-Gantzert stars as Erwin, whose scientist mother named her for the famous Erwin Schrödinger, “the father of quantum mechanics” and theorizer of the thought experiment “Schrödinger’s Cat.”

Her mother’s dead, and poor Dad (Marc Evan Jackson) hasn’t a clue about impending puberty or this science thing she’s so good at.

Then again, as she voice-over narrates about how high school follows “Darwin’s Law, survival of the fittest,'” an intellectually-secure adult should be there to correct her (Darwin never said or “believed” that).

Director and co-writer Ali Scher and co-writer Joe Swanson (“The Doorman”) remind us that film folks don’t, by and large, know Jack about science.

Erwin’s mother figure is supposed to be her daffy hairdresser Aunt Tammy, who is anti-science because she thinks it’s “interfering with (Erwin’s) social development” and because she’s played by Cheryl Hines, wife of anti-vax crank RFK.

Tammy wears a different hairdo in every appearance, and her follicular “creations” are the film’s only sight-gags that work.

Erwin is left to plug along on her own, smartest kid in school, last picked for pretty much anything physical or fun. Older sister Ari (Chloe East) is 17, into boys and all the things girls do to make themselves attractive to them, and not at all into being Erwin’s sis.

And then a new student arrives to threaten the one thing Erwin has going for her, her unrivaled smarts. Nerdy nebbish Winston (Lincoln Lambert) is just as precocious with a keen interest in chemistry. They’re to be rivals for the science fair’s big summer science scholarship.

When Erwin decides her science fair experiment should be in the various properties of popularity, particularly scent, she reluctantly agrees to take on Winston as her lab partner. They’ll concoct a “Nutty Professor” like hormone that will make whoever chews their experimental chewing gum popular.

The funniest quips here are mere quotations of things famous scientists said, such as Ernest Rutherford’s crack that “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

The unpopular kid (Kat Conner Sterling) they use as their willing guinea pig, the gum’s abuse by too-young Erwin who interferes with her sister’s “popular” pretty girl/shallow girl clique, and other twists don’t serve up much of anything one could call sweet, cute or amusing.

The kids aren’t bad, just stuck playing blandly-written uninteresting “types.” The production has a candy-colored high school glow that nothing we see or hear lives up to.

A popular theory about screenwriting is that you don’t go into production on a comedy without an excess of gags that the cast and crew think are funny, the weakest of which will end up edited out.

If the jokes, characters and gags seen here are what made the final cut, sitting through every thing edited out of this clunker must be excruciating.

Rating: PG, thematic elements, sexuality

Cast: Sophia Reid-Gantzert, Lincoln Lambert, Marc Evan Jackson, Chloe East, Kat Conner Sterling and Cheryl Hines.

Credits: Directed by Alie Scher, scripted by  Ali Scher and Joe Swanson. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:28