Your Favorite TV Show, Only Dirtier

The best episode of "Everwood" you've never seen, "Nearing Grace" provides a fix for addicts of the now cancelled WB series who've been aching for their favorite show since it went off the air.

Starring "Everwood" lead Gregory Smith in the Ephram-like role of Henry Nearing, this movie has all the hallmarks of that show: small-town life, confused dads, dead moms, and hurting sons engaging in snappy patter with their sexually and emotionally blunt girlfriends. This being a motion picture, there's more explicit sex and drug use, but otherwise this is the "Everwood" feature film that never was. It probably doesn't help that Mr. Smith was playing Ephram in Season 3 of "Everwood" while simultaneously shooting "Nearing Grace."

Henry is that stalwart of the indie movie: a bright, young cutie-pie with a limitless vocabulary stuck in a small town. In this case, his prison cell is New Jersey, and his warden is his father, Shep, who's lost in alcoholic free-fall after the death of his wife. Dropping out of school to discover the meaning of life, Henry winds up entangled in sex games between a lethal hottie (Jordana Brewster) and her lacrosse-playing boyfriend (Chad Faust). Henry also has to deal with an acid-head brother (David Moscow) and a best friend (Ashley Johnson) who's in love with him.

It all sounds a bit like a John Hughes movie gone ultra-serious, like "Some Kind of Wonderful" forced to crossbreed with "Pretty in Pink," and its metaphor for escape is so ham-handed that only Mr. Hughes could have come up with it: Henry has a plane and a pilot's license and he dreams of running away on it and flying from town to town across America. Like an overachieving class valedictorian, "Nearing Grace" isn't even content to settle for one teen movie ending, and instead has two: a prom night blowout and a graduation ceremony speech that's (wait for it) straight from the heart.

But that aside, "Nearing Grace" has a lot going for it. The acting is uniformly excellent, with David Morse lending a soggy grandeur to Shep. Ms. Brewster is a bit too sexually confident to be a believable teenager, her carnivorous lust making her seem more like Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate" than an actual teenager. But Mr. Smith and Ms. Johnson are right on, with the latter stealing the film as easily as a 16-year-old illegally downloads the new Justin Timberlake CD.

The script is genuinely funny, and when the going gets a little thick you can rest assured that someone's going to puncture its inflated sense of self-regard with a sharp one-liner within seconds. By the end, if you can forget about your self-respect for a moment and release the part of your inner self that cries at AT&T commercials, you're likely to be sobbing as the credits roll.

But "Why bother?" hangs over this movie like a big wet blanket. It's basically "Everwood" on the big screen with David Morse instead of Treat Williams, New Jersey instead of Colorado, and set in the 1970s instead of the 2000s. Making a movie is a lot of work, so why imitate a TV show if you're going to put in all that time and effort? I loved "Everwood," however, and if "Nearing Grace" is on TV or in your Netflix queue, you'll probably enjoy it. But why pay $10.75 for something you can see for free and in reruns on the ABC Family channel?