There have been scores of high school movies, but, populated by caricatures and riddled with clichés and predictability, very few have achieved anything like a pass grade. However, directed by Will Gluck and written by Bert Royal, this gets an A* on all counts.

Disappointingly, it received little exposure on its cinema release last year and swiftly vanished from the screens, but not before reaping a pile of glowing reviews and earning its star, Emma Stone (last seen in House Bunny and Zombieland), a BAFTA nomination for the Orange Rising Star Award. Had more people seen the film, she’d have deservedly walked it.

Given that it’s the best high school comedy since Mean Girls, it’s a little unfortunate that she slightly resembles Lindsay Lohan, but she’s a considerably better and more engaging comedy actress with a great range of facial expressions and solid comic timing.

Here she’s Olive Penderghast, a high schooler who, slightly stretching credibility, could be invisible for all the attention anyone pays her. She only has one friend, the popular on campus Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka). However, not wishing to spend the weekend camping with her, Olive says she has a date.  Come Monday, after a weekend hanging round the house, Olive finds herself quizzed by Rhiannon about what happened. So, she tells another lie and says she lost her virginity to a college student. Unfortunately, she’s overheard by Marianne (the equally excellent Amanda Bynes), who runs the school’s ultra-conservative Christian society. She tells someone else, and soon the rumour’s all over campus.

So, when gay classmate Brandon turns up asking if she’ll pretend to sleep with him at a party so that folk will think he’s straight. Since she’s already got a reputation, what harm can it do?

But, when the bitchiness increases, she decides to go with the flow and give them exactly what they thing. She starts dressing provocatively and, taking a leaf out of her English class where they’re studying Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, wearing a red A on all her clothes.

Before long, the nerds, the outcasts and the fat boys are queuing up giving her money and gifts if she’ll pretend she had sex with them, obviously keeping the truth quiet to protect themselves.  And, before you know it, a jealous Rhiannon’s joined Marianne’s group, and Marianne’s boyfriend (Cam Gigadet) is claiming he caught a STD off Olive.

Throw in further complications involving an old crush (Penn Badgley) who’s turned back up, marital problems between her teacher (Thomas Haden Church) and his school counsellor wife (Lisa Kudrow) and an unfortunate date with the boy Rhiannon fancies, and Olive realises that somehow she has to sort her life out.

Ok, so the idea that losing your virginity while at school is a major scandal may not fit with the realities of teenage pregnancies, but this is an intelligent observation on the pressures teenage girls face to grow up too soon and the cruel nature of gossip. Stone gives a star-making performance, but everyone shines, particularly Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as the most supportive eccentric liberal parents you could ever imagine. Paying due homage to its roots in the classic bittersweet teen romance films of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe, most specifically Say Anything, it’s as funny, charming and touching as anything they made. Who knows. it might even prompt teenagers to read Nathaniel Hawthorne.