Movie Nation

This one has a familiar C movie face or two.

French woman has her head shaved as a traitor, but is anything but.

Nov.5, “Hell Hath no Fury” like a woman who had her head shaved.

In teen rom-coms, the “ugly duckling” is never, ever ugly. The “unpopular” kid is never repellent. And Mr. Right is always right under your nose. All you have to do is wax off the mustache to see him.

“Confessions of an Invisible Girl” is a tepidly sweet teen comedy, an “Around the World With Netflix” tale from Brazil. Even that “Confessions” title thing is a cliche. It’s got a bubbly star, good looking co-stars, a party and beaches. And tepid or not, I’ll say this for the script. They certainly give our heroine some unusual “problems” to overcome.

Friendless Tete (Klara Castanho) is smart but shy, 15 and never-been-kissed. But when her dad loses his job, the family moves to Copacabana and she starts going to a private school there. Maybe things’ll be different this time.

I mean, nobody here knows her nickname was “Death Pits Tete” at her last school. She sweats. A lot. It only happens when she’s stressed. Which is almost always.

She hasn’t figured out the “bring a second shirt to school” thing. And wears lots of perfume to hide the stink that her hyperhidrosis brings on.

Being a bit of a klutz doesn’t help. She meets nerdy Davi (Gabriel Lima) and gay Zeca (Marcus Bessa), and they introduce her to surfer-hunk Erik (Lucca Picon). But she barely has a chance to fantasize herself with him when she runs into the mean girls.

Valentina (Júlia Gomes) is Erik’s just-as-blonde girlfriend. And wherever Valentina goes, Lais (Fernanda Concon) follows.

To survive this school year, Tete will need a little makeover from grandma, a bigger one — including brow and mustache waxing, from new gay BFF Zeca. She’ll have to navigate mean girls jealousy, and the cruel judgement of her peers. But again she’s got Davi to lean on. And Zeca.

“‘Ashamed’ is just a cute word people like to use for ‘fear.'”

All of which sounds like a hundred other teen comedies, including a bit of business with a neighbor girl (Kiria Malheiros) with “issues” hired to be Tete’s “friend” at her new schoo.

I think I laughed once at this comedy (in Portuguese with subtitles, or dubbed into English). The line that the pretty surfer himbo mutters in his defense for taking (kissing) liberties is a classic “not my fault” plea, with a twist. It’s SOCIETY and the way it objectifies!

“Imagine being called ‘handsome’ every day of your life!”

The poor dear.

Some of the cracks about Tete’s alleged appearance issues could have been funny, her “Chewbacca” armpits and the like, could have been funny.

The “big party” is a must in such movies, and a bust here. Even the beach scenes, cute actors in swimwear, never come to life.

Director and co-writer Bruno Garotti is eating up a lot of Netflix’s Brazilian content cash, with this and “Rich in Love” and “DJ Cinderella.” Is Netflix actually vetting what he turns in? The unoriginal, unromantic and unfunny movies, perky and cute actresses and actors aside, pretty much all suck.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Klara Castanho, Gabriel Lima, Marcus Bessa, Júlia Gomes, Fernanda Concon, Caio Cabral, Lucca Picon

Credits: Directed by Bruno Garotti, script by Thalita Rebouças, Flavia Lins and Bruno Garotti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

“Birds of Paradise” is a dance film that begins with a jete and rises into an arabesque before collapsing in a heap, a parade of ballet drama cliches that winds up stuck at the barre.

The set up — ballerinas competing for “the prize,” a contract with the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet — may be conventional in the extreme. Poor plucky American girl is gambling everything on her grab at the big brass ring, in ballet battle with the spoiled rich girl.

But for much of the first act, writer-director Sarah Adina Smith, adapting a novel by A.K. Small, keeps us guessing about what she’ll do with this tinder box of tropes. Will things turn murderous, homoerotic, or something even more daring?

Our “heroine” Kate (Diana Silvers) could be capable of anything in her pursuit of glory. Her roommate and antagonist Marine (Kristine Froseth) is disturbed and starts a serious slapfight with the girl the others disdain as “Virginia,” because that’s where she’s from, not bothering to learn the “gawky” one is named Kate.

Things could go “Black Swan” in a hurry, or so one might hope.

There’s a rapprochement that includes a hallucinatory trip to the exotic/erotic dance club “Jungle,” where your cover charge alone won’t get you in. You’ve got to eat a psychedelics-laced worm as well.

There are sexual complications aplenty in this erotically-charged atmosphere. With a transgender stage manager and lithe, thin and gorgeous dancers of every gender preference in the corps, the possibilities make one dizzy with anticipation.

“Hetero dancers are such sluts!”

And the head of the corps, the one who drills them and will help decide their fate, is Madame Brunelle, the one they call “Le diable (the devil), played with cold authority Jacqueline Bisset. She barks orders in French, which she barks in French, which “Virginia” doesn’t speak.

“Show me you have what it takes to win the prize,” she purrs to tall, athletic (she quit basketball to take up ballet) Kate, testing her least-likely winner with a cruel stunt.

Alas, Smith (“Buster’s Mal Heart”) tosses the wheat up in the air, and only takes care of the chaff. The most interesting directions she teases are abandoned for the merely conventional, time and again.

The dance sequences, what few there are, have more daring to them than the plot of the picture. The back-stabbing and bonding and breaking down are all so tame that you wonder why they bothered.

It’s all pretty enough, with a couple of striking settings, one of them the lovely belle epoch academy where the gamines give their all.

Silvers gives away a little ruthlessness behind her doe eyes, and Froseth manages to throw a little vulnerability into her aloof entitlement. They do what they can, but if there were sharp edges to Small’s novel, Smith rubs them right off.

Le Diable’s catty remarks about “clumsy” and “weight you gained over Christmas” dancers are cruel, but we’ve seen crueler. Drama runs on conflict, and Smith seems hellbent on rendering everybody “nice,” or at least justifiable in their machinations and intrigues.

The usual “distractions” of male attention yields little, aside from top male dancer Felipe’s (Daniel Camargo) glorious instruction/seduction of “the new girl.”

“Nobody pays to see perfection,” he purrs, sizing up, with his hands, the woman he will have to life in their duets. “They pay to see romance…desire…dominance, bodies touching bodies.”

The most real moment of the entire enterprise comes when last year’s prima (Eva Lomby), who is Black, admits to vomiting to lose weight because of how she stands out, how she’s singled out for criticism because she has to compete “with all these skinny white girls.”

The rest? Rich girl “rebels,” poor girl “schemes,” other dancers are sabotaged, all for the chance to dance, and always in the most tried-and-true ways of every ballet picture that came before.

Rating R for drug use, sexual content, language and brief nudity

Cast: Diana Silvers, Kristine Froseth, Eva Lomby, Nassim Lyes, Daniel Camargo and Jacqueline Bisset

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah Adina Smith, based on a novel by A.K. Small. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:54

“The Many Saints of Newark” could be the pilot to a new Sopranos TV series.

It’s built that way, back-engineering stories, giving us the pre-mob don Tony Soprano and the family that made him a made man. It has a season’s worth of plot threads and an open-ended quality that allows some characters to be introduced and leaves others to enter the life of young, supposedly reluctant, supposedly “smart” mobster-to-be.

But the “origin story” that is the film’s chief appeal takes a back seat to “series pilot” requirements. The film’s biggest asset becomes a handicap. “Saints” never feels thorough, thought-through or complete, merely introductory.

Casting Vera Farmiga as Tony’s bitter-from-birth mother, the role played by Nancy Marchand, is the film’s master stroke. She is fierce and combative, and in her one moment of real reflection, resigned to the “idiot” “lazy” son who can do no right in her eyes, and almost accepting of her role in making him that way. It’s one of her finest performances.

Starting the story on the cusp of The Newark Race Riots of 1967? That’s the cleverest conceit of all, a moment of schisms coming to a head, a penny ante “numbers running” franchise of Five Families reckoning that the mugs and goombahs are clever enough to exploit, idiotic enough to misjudge and misunderstand.

The film opens with a cute “If these tombstones could talk” drift through a cemetery, with this or that character in voice-over remembering relationships, and who killed them and how.

“Saints” is basically the story of Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), young Tony Soprano’s handsome uncle, a big influence on the kid, played by William Ludwig as a tween and Michael Gandolfini, the late James Gandolfini’s son, as an older teen. A running theme of the story is that young Anthony is always watching, often over-hearing what’s going on in the world of the adults who surround him.

The day his dad, Johnny Boy Soprano (Jon Bernthal, in a too-small role), is arrested at a card game is when little Tony sees his first shooting. Growing up with his dad in prison, he flees parental punishment and seeks Uncle Dickie as a surrogate father.

Dickie has come off like a stand-up guy, married (Gabriella Piazza plays Joanne), a little less racist than his family as he deals with numbers runners like Harold (Leslie Odom Jr.), mentoring little Tony, sympathetic to young Giuseppina, his father’s new bride. The first moment “Saints” feels like “Sopranos” to me is when we see one of those whiplash explosions of savage violence the show was famous for, and Dickie reminds us what sociopaths are like.

Dickie and Junior (Corey Stoll)are under the thumb of “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti, their father, given a delusional, sociopathic edge by Ray Liotta. He’s the one who brings a much younger Italian bride Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi) home, a beauty who doesn’t speak English whom he can “groom” and push around and eventually push down the stairs.

But Dickie confronts his wife-beating father and beats him to death in his Cadillac. And then he cunningly covers it up to let us know this isn’t his first rodeo.

Over the course of “Saints,” Dickie will seek atonement through good deeds and generosity. He will strike up a relationship with his dad’s twin brother (Liotta again), imprisoned and something of a cultured sage. Dickie finds passion and tries to keep the peace in the face of a changing underworld, threats and disagreements within the family, especially with brother Junior. He will let us see the pasta-addicted pig in himself, and the savagery he can summon up when provoked.

And Tony? He watches, takes it all in, makes it known “I want no part of this” even though we know that commitment won’t last.

Odom’s screen presence makes Harold’s transformation from lackey to a Man on his Own easy to buy into. The character may be a thug, but there’s personal growth and “The Revolution will Not Be Televised” radicalization as he steps away from the “not in my neighborhood” and “white flight” joking Italian mobsters.

Nivola has a bit of a struggle, holding down the center as the story keeps jumping around, doing what pilots for series always do, throwing more characters into the mix — Big Pussy, Silvio (John Magaro impersonating stoop-shouldered, toupeed Little Steven Van Zandt from the series), Carmela, Paulie, “the usual suspects.”

The movie can’t hide its most obvious machinations, the “work arounds” built into using the son of the series star instead of a more polished actor in the part. Young Gandolfini may look right, but he gives the camera little more than the occasional dead-ringer-for-his-dad pose. Yes, here’s where Tony started to sense his size and ability to intimidate, and that’s where his love of what become “classic rock” (listening to Mountain, part of an “Original Hits, Original Stars” packed soundtrack) came from.

Immersing the viewer in that era, and in the early ’70s in the latter acts, gives the film both a hint of fading nostalgia — ice cream parlors and ice cream trucks, Mom and Pop stores — and period-appropriate grit, with barely more than a glimpse of the corrupt cops who largely let the Mafia slide and never hesitated to shake down a Black person who fell into their field of vision.

But the script? It’s scattered and never really comes together into something cohesive. It’s all “back story,” so the Greco/Roman tragedy of the saga is lost in “period detail” and “color” as it jumps around constantly, never settling in and getting under the skin of anyone.

There’s a joke, here and there, a laugh when this character is introduced or we’re shown how Littlest Tony sets up a numbers racket in his Catholic school. But the dialogue has been run through a Sicilian Slang Generator, with virtually every line from an adult peppered with “pazzo” this and “goomar” or “stronzate” that — insults, challenges or come-ons.

You can get away with depicting birth of the gold chain years and the Golden Age of the Sharkskin suit. But all this eating. It’s not just a stereotype anymore, no longer a “leave the gun, take the cannoli” punch line. It’s a cliche, although granted, an outsider who comes into this world (De Rossi’s Giuseppina) notices it and complains and mocks the men for it.

These gripes take me back to the TV series that conquered the culture back in the early 2000s. It’s just as plain now as it was then that it was embraced by an America that had stopped going to the movies, and hadn’t seen the scores of mob films that made everything about the show seem recycled from earlier bigger screen tales.

For me, the biggest boon if HBO is tempted into rebooting their greatest hit and Hollywood’s best Italian American actor make-work project might be they’ll finally make the case that Tony is as “smart” and “sensitive” as the character is described. I never shook that “Donnie Brasco” sense, backed by plenty of journalism about the “real” mob, that the only thing special about any of these mugs is how sociopathic and stupid they are, to a one.

Still, devotees of the series will get more out of these tainted “Saints” than the casual mob movie fan, and that’s enough.

Rating: R for strong violence, pervasive language, sexual content and some nudity

Cast: Alessandro Nivola, Leslie Odom, Jr., Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Corey Stoll, Michela De Rossi, Jon Bernthal, John Magaro and Michael Gandolfini.

Credits: Directed by Alan Taylor, scripted by David Chase and Lawrence Konner, based on Chase’s TV series. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time:

Everybody loves an underdog.

Except, well, Yankees fans, Cowboys fans, Alabama and Clemson fans, Dookies.

This Christmas, a pretty good cast that includes Oscar winner Anna Paquin and Dennis Quaid, with Zachary Levi in the title role, will bring “American Underdog,” the story of Kurt Warner’s late life football stardom, to the screen.

It’s the sort of story the NFL loves, like “Invincible.” Not like Concussion Gate or Colin Kaepernick.

Will fans out down the remote, stop updating their fantasy league and check it out?

How do we love Tim Blake Nelson? Let me pontificate the ways.

It’s the folksy demeanor, the disarming smile with just a pinch of menace, the Oklahoma drawl that makes you underestimate whoever he portrays on the silver screen, a drawl oft-deployed to best effect when he’s curling his lips around 40 word soliloquies when a mere two will do.

“Don’t let my white duds and pleasant demeanor fool ya. I, too, have been known to violate the statutes of man… and not a few of the laws of the Almighty!”

That’s the one and only Buster Scruggs. The Coen Brothers (“O Brother Where At Thou?” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”) unleashed Nelson’s magic, his special gift. Many a movie maker since has had the good sense to serve up him performing that sort of florid, arcane speech in all manner of motion pictures.

In “Old Henry,” a Western by a fellow who goes by Potsy Ponciroli, Nelson has his best role since “Buster.” It’s a tale of bad hombres who underestimate “some shaky old farmer” in the Middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma, and do so at their own peril.

Henry (Nelson) has been a Sooner since “before the guns went off,” meaning before the “Sooners” joined him there. His boy Wyatt (Gavin Lewis of TV’s “Little Fires Everywhere”) may bridle at being stuck where they are at the start of a new century (it’s 1906). But the old man growls “You’ll discover there’s worse arrangements.”

Wyatt’s been sheltered as much as the son of a ten-years-widowed pig farmer can be. Henry won’t even let the boy go hunting. Guns are too dangerous. Just how dangerous becomes obvious when a riderless horse with blood on the saddle shows up.

Henry rides out to find the missing man and discovers him passed out from a bloody chest wound. Henry spies the saddlebag full of cash. And he does the math.

“Nope.”

But he reconsiders as he’s about to ride off, covers his tracks like he’s done it before, and when he gets home he and Wyatt take responsibility for the stranger’s welfare even as Henry hides the man’s gun and loot.

Of course he’s got to ride off and fetch the doc. Of course he ties the unconscious man down. Of course Wyatt ignores most everything the old man warns him about before leaving.

And when Henry returns, chased back after getting a look at the dangerous hombres with badges hunting for their “guest,” there’s trouble to deal with right now, and bigger trouble on its way over the hill.

Stephen Dorff is Ketchum, the “long-winded” leader of the posse, a guy we’ve already seen torture and hang a man in pursuit of information, a violent man given to no hasty action when a lot of talking and strategizing can be indulged in first. And Ketchum recognizes that this “shaky old farmer” “didn’t hold that pistol like any farmer I’ve ever seen.”

Writer-director Ponciroli, one of the creators of the Billy Ray Cyrus TV comedy “Still the King,” gives us three “You ask a lotta questions, mister” interrogations, nicely written and chewed on by those who play them.

“You’re not fixin’ to shoot any of us with that pistol, are ya?”

“So far, I got no reason to.”

Nelson and Dorff are nicely-matched. Scott Haze does a fine job of making the wounded stranger untrustworthy, sentimental and yet almost sympathetic at times.

Lewis never shakes the “modern, genteel,” almost “delicate” vibe as the boy and seems a trifle miscast. Trace Adkins has a much smaller and just-demanding-enough part, as Henry’s brother-in-law, and doesn’t embarrass himself.

This is Nelson’s show, trotting out lazy-eyed, slow-talking threats, evasions and folksy fatherly wisdom to a kid who doesn’t respect him — yet.

“I seen the scars on your body.”

“Cuz I ain’t hid’em from ya. Now maybe you’ll understand your raisin’.”

The plot covers a seriously overfamiliar, over-filmed piece of Western lore and legend. But Ponciroli stages a mean opening chase on foot and a gimlet-eyed shootout that holds its own with many a Western, pretty much any one not filmed by Walter Hill or Clint Eastwood.

But it’s the title character and the great character actor playing him that turns this otherwise decent indie Western into something special. And Nelson pulls that off every time he squints or opens his mouth.

Rating: unrated, bloody, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, Gavin Lewis, Scott Haze, Max Arciniega, Richard Speight Jr, Trace Adkins and Stephen Dorff

Credits: Scripted and directed by Potsy Ponciroli. A Shout! Studios release.

Running time: 1:39

Twee? Check. “Vintage? Retro? Sure. Animated? And adorable? Check and check again.

“The French Dispatch” comes out Oct. 22. At last.

Justin Chon‘s “Blue Bayou” could be a companion piece to Lee Isaac Chung’s Oscar-winning “Minari.” It’s a grittier and far more downbeat look at a bleak version of the Korean-American immigration experience.

Writer, director and star Chon, who gave us “Gook” and “Ms. Purple,” tells the story of a drawling, motorcycling 30something New Orleans tattoo artist who first came to America via adoption 30 years before. And judging from his present, growing up wasn’t the sunniest of experiences for Antonio LeBlanc.

We meet Antonio, who naturally has to explain “Where’re you from?” twice, in a job interview. He needs extra work and loves working on motorcycles. He’s got his adorable, kindergarten-age stepdaughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) with him.

He grew up in St. Francisville, and he came from Korea as a toddler. But all that matters to the unseen interviewer is the two felony convictions on his record.

Antonio’s a bit desperate as he and his wife have another baby on the way. Kathy, played by Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, is a very pregnant physical therapist who says what good wives do, that “things will work out.” But even as a walking ad for his tattoo skills, Antonio won’t be able to drum up enough business to support them.

And the thing that landed him in jail, twice, might be tempting again if cash gets tight.

He’s a doting step-dad, but new enough to it to irk his wife over his constant indulgences of Jessie. She’s always grabbing her favorite foods and sweets at the supermarket, and left on her own, dresses for school like a costume shop is having a fire sale.

“You need to be her parent, not her friend!”

Then there’s Kathy’s ex. Ace is a cop (Mark O’Brien) who walked out on her and little Jessie, and is making noise as only a cop can about his “rights” regarding visitation with a little girl who is both afraid of him and unforgiving. What’s worse, Kathy’s ex has a partner (Emory Cohen) who is even less shy at throwing around his uniformed weight in an effort to intimidate Kathy and Antonio and “help” Ace out.

Antonio may be pals with an ICE agent (Toby Vitrano). But when cops decide to make your immigrant life hell, you can bet “deportation” is included in their bag of threats. They’re going to need a lawyer (Vondie Curtis-Hall). They’re going to need money for that lawyer.

Chon tells this story in documentary-harsh colors and natural lighting, with the loveliest images dreamy flashbacks to a woman we figure out was Antonio’s mother, in a key moment in his childhood.

He peels away layer’s of Antonio’s past as he adds complications to his present. His mother-in-law (Geraldine Singer) wants nothing to do with him, and when the chips are down, she’s quick to remind Kathy “He’s not American. You’re not responsible for him!”

And then there’s stranger he meets at the hospital where Kathy gets her ultrasound. Parker (Linh Dan Pham) is older and takes an instant interest in Antonio and his little family. She drifts into the story as a woman of mystery, clinging to Antonio for reasons that aren’t all that clear even after they’re supposedly “explained.”

The big contrast is that Antonio has wholly assimilated. We have no notion that he remembers much about Korea or so much as a word or two of Korean. Parker has family, and they embrace Louisiana life even as they cling to vestiges of the country they left.

Chon has wonderful scenes with little Miss Kowalske, answering Jessie’s heartbreaking questions as she’s too little to understand much of what’s going on. She only has her own limited experience of the world to draw on, and to her, Daddies leave or are taken away. Is Mommy next?

Chon shines as the lead, bringing working poor reality to this guy who is facing not just a crisis, but has to re-engineer his limited life to plan for a future.

Vikander is in Oscar winning form, as usual, bringing this earthy, pragmatic and protective mother to life. She doesn’t put much into Kathy’s Big Easy drawl, but navigates the waters between nurturing and fierce protectiveness with such ease she takes your breath away.

And damned if she doesn’t sing the title Roy Orbison song (famously covered by Linda Ronstadt) with conviction, emotion and range that just knocks you out.

“Blue Bayou” sells its subtext with subtle skill for two acts, but Chon shifts to send-a-message mode in an overdrawn third act and downright manipulative finale. There’s a righteous outrage at the heart of the story, but all I have to say is “airport scene” to give away that he overdoes it.

It’s still a winning and quite moving look at the immigrant experience, and how fragile and fraught this past decade’s politics have revealed it to be.

Rating: R for language (profanity) throughout, violence, smoking

Cast: Justin Chon, Alicia Vikander, Sydney Kowalske, Mark O’Brien,
Linh Dan Pham, Emory Cohen and Vondie-Curtis Hall.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Justin Chon. An eOne movie released by Focus.

Running time: 1:57

Let’s put all the “Dear Evan Hansen” bashing into context, shall we?

Here’s what 2021, what was supposed to be our post-pandemic year at the movies, has given us in musical form. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” felt dated and quaint, but wasn’t bad. “In the Heights” wasn’t remotely in the same league with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s follow-up, “Hamilton,” and lacks the charm of his Netflix cartoon musical “Vivo.” “Come from Away” was captured, on stage, where its small-town-does-big-things conceit works. There was also the Sparks Brothers’ quasi-daring, generally unsatisfying “Annette,” and another “Cinderella” (Amazon streaming only).

“Hansen,” a winner of half a dozen Tony Awards four years ago, was always going to be the weakest of that lot, pretty much by default. And let’s hope it remains that way as “Tick Tick…Boom!” and a remake of “West Side Story” are yet to come.

Why list the other adaptations or composed for the screen musicals surrounding it? Every Broadway era is filled with forgettable and forgotten musicals, some of them with a bookshelf covered with Tonys to show for it. A Broadway Twitter take that I read worried “that people will think everything Broadway produces” is as middling as this dramatically-limp take on the squishy social media-age “bullied/anxious/you’re not alone” obsession, one built on over-performed and instantly-forgettable songs that sound like ’90s Christian Pop radio anthems.

Maybe Broadway’s long obsession with the tourist trade has rubbed some of the edges off musical theater. Because this isn’t “The Book of Mormon” or “Hamilton.” Lump “Evan” in with “Jamie,” in with the legions of film adaptations (“Waitress,” “Billy Elliot”) or even “High School Musical.” The emotions reached for are as generic and blandly predictable as the music.

“Dear Evan Hansen” is a tale of grief and a serio-comic mistake in the middle of that mourning that turns into a sort of life-affirming prank.

A show that grapples with the fragility of today’s middle-class-and-up adolescents — anxious, isolated, medicated and bullied, in person and online — it becomes a film that takes a long time to find that “grief,” one whose lighter moments are few and generally trite. And it’s a movie that needed to recast its plummy-voiced lead with a younger, lesser singer better able to convey high school angst.

Director Stephen Chbosky did “Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a wonderful film set in a similar high school angsty and upper-classish milieu. But as the film was produced by the father of Ben Platt, the Tony winner in the title role, that “let’s make it more real” move was never going to happen.

Platt plays Hansen as the classic wallflower, almost friendless, anonymous, and singing about it.

“Step out, step outta the sun, if you keep getting burned.”

He crushes on rich girl Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), guitarist with the Westview High pep band, and can’t express that to her. He confides in his “only friend,” the droll, bitchy and gay Jared (Nick Dodani of TV’s “Atypical”), who corrects him with the put-down, “we’re FAMILY friends,” as in their parents know each other and thus, they’re not close.

Evan, fragile and in therapy and on three different anti-anxiety medications, has a couple of rough encounters with the troubled Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), Zoe’s older brother, given to threatening outbursts but plainly going through things himself.

That’s how Evan’s “write a self-affirming letter to yourself every day” assignment from his unseen therapist blows up in his face. All his worries, anxieties, his crush on Zoe, laid out in a couple of paragraphs that he prints out, and that Connor finds and takes from him.

Evan’s worst fear is that the jerk will post it online. He never considers that the jerk will go home, kill himself, and his “Dear Evan Hansen” letter found on Connor’s body will read like a compassionate reaching out to a friend, and a sad suicide note addressed to that friend seemingly composed by a raging, medicated, in-and-out-of-mental-hospitals ticking bomb that no one in their high school will miss.

“Dear Evan Hansen” is about Connor’s family reaching out and questioning the kid about her dead son’s “secret” life and secret friend, about the Evan’s lie-on-the-fly inventions, words of comfort about that dead son and their non-existent friendship. And it’s about how that misguided but understandable string of lies, just to make Connor’s mom (Amy Adams) feel better, build and spread and reinvent Connor’s image, and in the end, blows up in everybody’s faces.

Evan’s ulterior motives concern getting closer to Zoe, who hated her brother, who could be cruel and self-absorbed and sucked up all her parents’ (Danny Pino plays the stepdad) energy and attention.

Evan’s “comforting” efforts include inventing email exchanges with the help of Jared. “Sincerely Me,” a trio number about composing these fanciful notes in a way that won’t make the “friends” look like same-sex lovers, is the lone light moment in “Dear Evan Hansen,” and is inventively staged and filmed as Evan and Jared try drafts and ideas out that the dead Connor, wandering the halls of their high school as if he never died, sings and corrects and sings again.

“Cause all it takes is a little reinvention, it’s easy to change if you give it your attention.”

A “new” Connor emerges, post-mortem. And the school’s popular, hyper-active activist student body and every-other-club president Alana (Amandla Stenberg of “The Hate You Give,” “Everything Everything” and TV’s “The Eddy”) grabs onto paying tribute to their dead classmate as her latest cause.

Things mushroom from there.

What took me aback about the film was how nobody in Connor’s family is riven with grief. Amy Adams can make us cry at the drop of tear, but the film makes Mother and Stepdad and can’t-process-her-mixed-feelings daughter work and work and work towards anything resembling a realistic response to a child’s suicide.

The whole Connor as their “substitute son” business left me cold. Julianne Moore, cast as Evan’s always-working nurse-mother, may have a solo and a couple of decent scenes, but seems wasted in a part that’s thinly-developed.

The pall that hangs over the story never lets the tumbling dominoes of lies develop the kind of comic momentum that would have energized the picture. “Meet John Doe” and other plays and films have a similar premise — a letter mistaken for something it isn’t, layers of comical lies cover that up, etc. It just doesn’t come to life here.

On the plus side, Adams and Moore have a confrontation that is brittle and bitter, but even that falls just short of what it might have been.

The radiant Stenberg almost steals the picture as the classic “always moving” “popular” girl who lets Evan know they have more in common than he realizes. Prescriptions, for starters. She has a nice, reflective and somber solo that she co-wrote for the film, “The Anonymous Ones.”

“The parts we can’t tell, we carry them well, but that doesn’t mean they’re not heavy.”

Ryan is properly volcanic as Connor, a kid people would stay away from and no one truly understands. Dever (“Booksmart”) gives us a taste of how a grittier, more realistic “Dear Evan” might have played. She’s not a bad singer, either.

And Dondani is kind of amusing playing the gay-not-quite-best-friend cliche.

But Platt’s been playing the guy so wrong he embellishes every lyrical line with distracting musical flourishes. The show-off. It’s a mannered performance that never lets us forget it’s a “performance.”

The social media aspect of the story is tired, even if it wasn’t when this show hit Broadway. There’s a squishy, undefined quality about the “problem” this musical is addressing, and that goes for the feel-good cultural myth that being told “you’re not alone” is a comfort or even part of a “solution” to what’s gone wrong with Evan’s, Connor’s, Zoe’s and Alana’s lives.

I dare say every review of this adaptation has the words “well-intentioned” in it. “Sweet,” too. So it is. But if that’s the best thing you can say about it, well…

Rating: Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving suicide, brief strong language and some suggestive reference

Cast: Ben Platt, Kaitlyn Dever, Colton Ryan, Amy Adams, Amandla Stenberg, Danny Pino, Nik Dondani, and Julianne Moore

Credits: Directed by Stephen Chbosky, scripted by Steven Levenson, based on his stage musical, music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. A Universal release.

Running time:

Never caught it on the stage, but one certainly hears all about it on Broadway websites and such.

Another uplifting musical about self confidence, acceptance, tolerance, self worth, how mean everybody is in high school.