"Jodie Foster in a nun's habit! Thank you, God!"

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is one of those coming of age movies, so poignant it's almost painful, where you fear for the young characters because you know there's the potential of really awful things happening to them and you just want everybody to be okay.

Or maybe I just have issues.

Set in the 1970s, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys tell the stories of Tim (Kieran Culkin) and Francis (Emile Hirsch), 14-year-old best friends and Catholic schoolmates. The boys and their friends escape the drab realities of their lives by creating a comic book world featuring a team of superheroes called The Atomic Trinity. While Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster) rules their real lives, the Atomic Trinity does battle with her comic book alter ego, alternately known as Nunzilla and Pegleg.

We see the boys in various acts of adolescent rebellion: experimenting with drugs and alcohol, mouthing off to their teachers ("Jesus H. Christ," exclaims the priest, to which Tim replies, "Excuse me, Father, but what does the H. stand for?") and a series of ever-escalating pranks. We also watch young love blossom between Francis and Margie Flynn (Jena Malone), a girl who is haunted by more than the typical teenage anxieties.

It's in this troubling storyline that I think The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys falters, if only slightly. Where the boys' stories are delicate and moving and handled with a light touch by first-time feature director Peter Care, Margie and Francis' romance feels melodramatically gothic and heavy-handed. If less time had been spent on it perhaps it would have felt like a darkly appropriate accent to the storyline, but the amount of screen time it's given weighs down the narrative.

The Dangerous Lives of Teenage Insurance Salesmen.

The movie is punctuated by gorgeously animated sequences created by Todd MacFarlane (Spawn), in which the Atomic Trinity come to the aid of Sorcerella, a character based on Margie, in her battle against Pegleg. These interludes are imaginative and energetic. And since they are the revenge fantasies of a 14-year-old boy, they are loud and violent, full of morally unambiguous situations and dark victories. I liked how the boys imagined themselves in their comic book world, as four average school-kids who morph into powerful, yet unattractive heroes, outcasts even as they fight evil; they're more Swamp Thing than Superman. I also liked how, in the animated world, their characters were voiced by different actors, while Pegleg and Sorcerella were voiced by Foster and Malone; in the boys' fantasies they don't even sound like themselves, while the women retain some of the qualities — and the power — they hold in real life.

The performances by the trio of young stars are exceptional. Hirsch and Malone hit all the right notes in their tender love story, but the true standout is Kieran Culkin. He plays Tim with a heartbreaking mix of arrogance and insecurity, sadness masked by bravado, never descending into cuteness or condescension. Given the right roles, this kid should be a big star.

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys pulls off the rare trick of making you feel nostalgic for adolescence while simultaneously reminding yourself how lucky you are to be out of it. It's a good film, whose major mistake is that it tries too hard to be a great film. But if its reach exceeds its grasp, you have to at least give it credit for trying.

Gorilla Pants rating: 2.5 out of 4 bananas