Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) is an outsider teen lying low with his hard-up mom (Jean Smart) and his deadbeat stepdad (The Hangover’s Zach Galifianakis) when he meets bright kindred spirit Sheeni (Portia Doubleday) with whom he promptly falls in love. There are, alas, several impediments to their happiness: her religious parents don’t approve, the geographical distance is significant and worse, Sheeni already has a boyfriend, the overachieving, poetry-writing Trent. Undeterred, our hero adopts a moustachioed bad boy alter ego named François Dillinger and sweeps the girl off her feet. But can Nick Twisp contain or even survive his fictional creation?

Contemporary cinema would be considerably less lively without frustrated American teens seeking to lose their virginity, particularly when Michael Cera is the teen concerned. The young actor’s deadpan charms are given plenty of screen time in Youth in Revolt, an adventure in cherry popping adapted from a well-regarded epistolary novel by C.D. Payne. As Hitchcock once observed, it’s better and altogether more liberating to adapt a trashy novel rather than a good one, and Gustin Nash’s screenplay is persistently weighed down by respect for the source material.

It probably does not help that three volumes have been squeezed into a 90-minute running time; characters come and exit stage left before they’ve made any real impression; decent name actors – Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis – are shoehorned into cameo parts. The effect is that breathless cardinal sin of screenwriting - and then and then and then.

There is an uncertainty, too, in the delivery; no matter how much one enjoys the Zen blankness of Wes Anderson, the high jinx of Ferris Bueller, the panting sexuality of Animal House, it’s difficult to love these competing flavours when they’re all crammed together.

At heart we think this is a sweet movie in which Michael Cera gets the girl, but it can be hard to tell with all the pretentions in the way.