By Nigel Powlson

AMERICAN Pie meets Nouvelle Vague seems an unlikely marriage of cinema styles.

Jean Paul Belomondo doing disgusting things with home baked pastries? Jason Biggs staring moodily into space while smoking Gauloises cigarettes? Maybe not.

But teen rebellion movie Youth in Revolt finds an unlikely bridge between those two extremes.

Based on the acclaimed novel by C.D. Payne, it stars Juno's Michael Cera as Nick Twisp, whose love of Sinatra and Fellini is hardly helping his chief desire – to lose his virginity.

Nick shares a home with his trailer trash mother (Jean Smart) who has a revolving front door for her string of boyfriends.

Meanwhile, Nick's dad (Steve Buscemi) has a girlfriend half his age and no desire to see Nick enter his love nest.

But when all seems hopeless, Nick comes across the free-spirited Sheeni (Portia Doubleday) while on a family holiday.

Sheeni worships all things French, hanging posters of Jean-Luc Godard films on her bedroom walls, slipping into the language at every available opportunity and enticing Nick from behind her sunglasses with invitations to rub her shoulders with sun cream.

Geography and an accomplished boyfriend lurking in the background, mean Nick's a non-starter in the race for Sheeni's affections. But she still urges him on, suggesting he needs to be bad and earn her respect with daring acts of French-like rebellion,

So Nick creates alter ego Francois, with a moustache, a permanent cigarette and bags of Gallic attitude and sets about beating a destructive path to Sheeni's heart that includes trashing cars and faking his own death.

Cera, despite being well over age for the part, is perfectly cast as Nick.

We have seen him play the frustrated teen virgin maybe a little too often but he's very good at it and the creation of an alternative personality allows him to escape occasionally.

Doubleday is equally convincing as the girl looking to turn her life into a movie.

This is probably much better than you expect and will even play well with audiences beyond its target age range.

YOUTH IN REVOLT

CERTIFICATE: 15

RUNNING TIME: 89mins

STARTS: Today at Showcase, Odeon and Cinema De Lux in Derby; Cineworld in Burton.

RATING: 3/5