AMERICAN Pie meets Nouvelle Vague seems an unlikely marriage of cinema styles. Jean Paul Belmondo 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 then Nick comes across the free-spirited Sheeni (Portia Doubleday) 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. So Nick creates an 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.

Director Miguel Arteta sometimes doesn't know whether to run with the anarchy or to stick to the normal routine and even at a brief 89 minutes the story begins to flag.

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