But if pictures like "Save the Last Dance" and "Bring It On," or the new "Crazy/Beautiful," are any indication, adult moviegoers are better off posing as secret teenagers. Why is it that, more and more, teen love stories are the ones that refuse to talk down to their audience -- even when they're dealing with stock conventions like romances that cross color or class boundaries? "Crazy/Beautiful" has its flaws, but it's elementally entertaining, and believable enough to transport us completely into its world for an hour and a half.

Nicole (Kirsten Dunst) is a 17-year-old troublemaker who's careering toward disaster: She has been picked up on DUI charges, and thinks nothing of cutting class to get high with her equally fast pal, Maddy (played with husky, gravelly charm by tough pixie Taryn Manning). Her emotional problems are knotty and deep-rooted; still, Nicole barely acknowledges the privileges her social status affords her. She's the daughter of a well-off liberal congressman (Bruce Davison), and she lives, along with him, her uptight stepmother (Lucinda Jenney) and her toddler stepsister, in a minimalist-mod California luxury abode that appears to be 90 percent windows. She couldn't care less that she's able to attend a top-flight school -- a school that one of her less-privileged classmates, Carlos (Jay Hernandez), has to travel two hours by bus to reach.

Carlos is blazingly bright and ambitious; he hopes to escape his barrio background to become a naval pilot. When he and Nicole meet, the sizzle is immediate. The two get along so well that their cultural backgrounds should be the least of their problems, but still, their worlds don't mesh comfortably. This is a classic love story, but one that's not afraid to take a few jabs at the cluelessness of goodhearted liberals who, despite their admirable intentions, can never quite grasp how the other half lives. You see it in the way Nicole's father, anxious to help Carlos get into the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, makes an awkward and ridiculous comment about Carlos' neighborhood contemporaries' falling prey to "la vida loca" in the inner city.

Worse yet, Nicole is essentially a careless party girl who fails to grasp Carlos' dedication and commitment to succeeding. In a neat twist on the standard saga of the bad boy who leads a good girl into trouble, "Crazy/Beautiful" gives us a hardworking, responsible boy beguiled by a girl who is, for now at least, no good.

	Crazy/Beautiful Directed by John Stockwell Starring Kirsten Dunst, Jay Hernandez, Bruce Davison, Taryn Manning Print story E-mail story

The key to "Crazy/Beautiful" is that director John Stockwell, working from a script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, doesn't play the adult outsider with a camera. He has sympathy for his characters, but he never passes judgment on them -- there's no implicit tsk-tsking in the way he shows Nicole half-zonked but blissful, clambering into the back seat of Maddy's jeep (and eventually into Carlos' lap) as it whizzes through night-lit Los Angeles boulevards. He's smart enough to see the allure, and the perilous beauty, of teenage recklessness without going so far as to condone it. The story occasionally runs aground on melodramatic writing, especially in the scenes involving Davison and Dunst: As a parent at the end of his rope, Davison gets the squarest dialogue. Even so, he's such a preternaturally grounded actor that he makes even his most heavy-handed lines sound graceful.

Hernandez and Dunst make an appealing pair, gamboling like playful pups on a beach date or stripping down to their skivvies (he awkwardly, she brazenly) in Nicole's lux but messy glassed-in bedroom. Even if Hernandez doesn't have much depth, he's both smoldering and good-natured, a sex symbol with plenty of safety valves.

But Dunst's Nicole is the heart of the movie, and this role stands apart from anything she's done before. Dunst has always been adorable: In her earlier roles, with that lustrous hair and skin that seems to glow from within, she has always looked like a textbook dream teen queen. But what makes her genuinely appealing is the current of instinctual intelligence that thrums beneath the surface of her performances. In pictures like "Bring It On," "Dick" and "The Virgin Suicides," she's always vital, never vapid. Even when she's up to blatantly ridiculous teen shenanigans (like jumping up and down, squealing over that evergreen teen heartthrob Richard Nixon, with costar Michelle Williams in "Dick"), she always tempers youthful silliness with just the right amount of self-awareness and poise.

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