"Where do you put the diaper?"

Juno, wry as they come and laden with hyperarticulate wisecracks, could have grated.  Too much cleverness can sink a movie, and in Juno’s opening scenes -- in which our title heroine trades cringe-worthy barbs with a convenience store clerk -- I started to fear that might be the case here. I shouldn’t have worried.

Ellen Page plays Juno, a 16-year-old whose spur-of-the-moment seduction of her best friend (Michael Cera) has spawned a spawn. After fleeing the abortion clinic, Juno confesses to her parents, played with the perfect blend of love and exasperation by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, and starts looking for a couple to adopt the future baby.

She finds them in Vanessa and Mark (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). She’s a tightly-wound corporate type, he’s a jingle writer yearning to rock. As Juno bonds with the prospective father-to-be, puzzles over her own love life and copes with pregnancy (“They call me the cautionary whale,” she says of her schoolmates), she finds herself at the crossroads of adolescence and adulthood.

That's a tough lunch posture for someone who's running short of lap.

Okay, that sounds a little serious, potentially even sappy. The movie is anything but. Well, it is serious at times, but treats its characters with such honesty and compassion that it never gets bogged down in sentiment or succumbs to melodrama. Plus there’s the funny. Getting back to that cleverness I was talking about earlier, screenwriter Diablo Cody loads her script with funny lines, only a few of which land with a thud, and director Jason Reitman delivers it all with a light touch seasoned with sight gags. The movie kept me laughing out loud from start to finish.

But as good as their work is, the main reason Juno works so well is Ellen Page. In lesser hands, Juno could have turned into a precocious sitcom teen, but Page lets us see the insecurity, the inexperience and the plain old kid-ness behind the irony and bravado. Juno’s a good kid, wise beyond her years in some ways, with a lot to learn in others. She’s figuring it out as she goes, the same thing that could be said of many of Juno’s characters. The smart ones are those who realize it.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3.5 out of 4 bananas