There’s something about Charlie Bartlett. (Uh, that wasn’t a joke.) I mean as a movie there’s something about it that’s hard to define and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Basically, there are some things I like about it, and there are some things that I don’t like as much and what these two halves combine to make is something that leaves me fairly ambiguous. Hence the peculiar star rating, I’m giving plus the kind of emphatic (and hopefully not to lengthy) recommendation that I’m about to give.

Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) has washed out of several prestigious prep schools, expelled for various rule-breaking activities. His mess of a mother Marilyn (Hope Davis) signs him up for public school where Charlie catches the eye Susan Gardner (Kat Dennings) and catches the wrath of school bully Murphey (Tyler Hilton). Charlie and Murphey eventually meet on the middle ground of going into business together selling pharmaceuticals. But it goes further than that as Charlie begins connecting to his fellow students while acting as their psychiatrist.

The plot propels Charlie from one crazy exploit to the other, whether it’s selling prescription drugs, turning Murph’s bum-fights-esque high school waylays into a bestselling DVD or producing a depressed student’s provocative play. Great stuff to be sure, I have a fondness for tales of high school hijinks, so long as they’re not exploiting tired old teen movie archetypes. Charlie as played by Yelchin is clever, earnest and motivated. Sure the whole thing starts as one of his scams, but we’re amazed just as much as Charlie by the fact that being the student shrink wasn’t even half the scam he thought it was.

I also really liked the relationship between Charlie and Murph; their adversarial partnership is one of the comedic highlights. Of course as these things go, there’s more to Murph to meets the eye, a contradictory nature so to speak, a riddle wrapped in an enigma and smothered in secret sauce. Well, not quite and his secret ambition is pretty obvious if you’ve seen Rushmore, but I like how Hilton manages to make it work in the case of Murph. Speaking of adversaries, Robert Downey Jr. gets a twofer as the high school principal – who is both Charlie’s nemesis in administration and Susan’s father. I always love Downey, but I’ve seen him play this part before: strung out, outmanned and just a little bit fanatical.

The problem is I’m not sure exactly what screenwriter Gustin Nash and director John Poll expect me to get out of the story. On the one hand, Charlie Bartlett can be taken as a high school comedy, whose purpose is comedic pleasure for the audience, but then on the other, there seems to be some kind of messaging afoot. What that message is, ain’t exactly clear though. Don’t sell pills? Listen to each other? Be like the boy? I have no idea. Everything seems to be going well for the fun time and then the script says “Hold up, let’s consider this.”

Now that would be fine, but frankly I don’t think that the movie goes far enough. The whole subject matter of prescription meds is a topic rife for satire and parody. Ritalin has made a generation of kids dependent on a little pill in order to exercise self-control, heck they even give it Charlie, who in turn sold it to fellow students as a hallucinogen in time for the school dance, which went buck wild as result. It’s only when a kid tries to kill himself with one of Charlie’s “prescriptions” that the party stops, but is there understanding as what is truly wrong in this situation?

There are some elements of black comedy in the movie, but unfortunately it’s not very consistent. One gets the impression that this was the aesthetic being aimed for, but sitting between the fluffier scenes it doesn’t work very well; there’s no steady beat to the rhythm of the film. One also gets the feeling that Nash and Poll were trying to create a John Hughes aesthetic, but the trick is that those movies were much more self-contained; The Breakfast Club took place over one Saturday in detention, in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off it was playing hooky and in Sixteen Candles it was Sam’s Sweet 16.

I still have to say though; I do have enormous affection for this movie. A lot of my reservations come out of the choices made by the filmmakers in both tone and plot, but what’s there on screen is well executed by a cast made up of some very talented young people, especially future Chekov, Yelchin.