Whatever It Takes: romantic teen comedy. Starring Shane West, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, James Franco, Marla Sokoloff, Aaron Paul, Colin Hanks and Manu Intirayami. Written by Mark Schwan. Directed by David Raynr. Rated PG-13. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

Take one raunchy teenage comedy hit from last year, American Pie, mix in two cupfuls of Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, pour in an attractive, enthusiastic cast of young actors, stir together and let bake for six or seven months (or until maybe the public has forgotten the previous movie you’re ripping off), then serve up to willing (and possibly unwitting) moviegoers and voila!

You’ve got Whatever It Takes a breezy, slick and insubstantial movie that’s slightly better than expected. But that doesn’t mean you should go, unless you’re in your teens and it’s a dead Friday night. Not that teens may like it much better, as it’s vision of youth doesn’t feel anymore real than anything else coming out of Hollywood.

Whatever It Takes starts from the exact same mixing bowl as American Pie: it’s four weeks before the prom and graduation at Gilmore High School and there’s a bunch of virginal guys who don’t have dates.  Chief among them is Ryan Woodman (Shane West) a good-looking, but geeky brain who’s reduced (he feels) to asking his equally geeky and brainy next-door neighbor and best friend Maggie (Marla Sokoloff) to go with him to the prom.

But the girl he really wants is arch snob airhead Ashley Grant (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe), the inaccessible pillar of desire for every guy in school, especially Ryan, who’s too nerdy to register in her tiny vacuous Universe. Ryan, like all of us at one time or another, is blinded by love and can’t see her for what she is.

In walks hunky jock Chris (James Franco) who happens to be both Ashley’s cousin and equally smitten with Ryan’s best friend and prom date, Maggie.  Chris is such a dolt, he can’t walk past Maggie without offending her.  He wants her bad and he needs Ryan’s help to get her as much as the more sensitive and poetic Ryan needs Chris’ to get Ashley.

And so . . . well, I think you can see where this is going.  Whatever It Takes’ screenplay offers up not a single surprise, keeping its colors completely within the lines. All the characters wind up exactly where they belong. Yet, I found it more watchable than the somewhat lauded American Pie, which I found so enervating I rewound the tape after forty-five minutes.

What saves the movie from sinking is the bouncy coltishness of its young cast and the visual acumen of director David Raynr. Raynr keeps things moving along at a bouncy clip that almost but not quite puts a veneer over the clichés (as typical in these things, only the bad kids have sex, while the good ones remain virginal until the fadeout).

He shows he’s got a good eye, especially in the credit sequence, where Ashley’s makeup materials have a stop-motion life of their own, which serves as a clever comment on her own empty vanity. He also gets some excitement from the climax at the prom, which turns out to be an amusing disaster, brought about by Ryan’s equally geeky sidekicks.  There’s also some funny by-play involving Ryan’s mother (Julia Sweeney) who, to his deep embarrassment, is the school nurse given to safe sex lectures employing a six foot plastic penis as a prop to demonstrate condom use.

James Franco as Chris shows a talent for playing gritty knuckleheads while Marla Sokoloff as Marla has a very winsome doe-like appeal as the true beauty of the piece. But none of this to suggest you should pay anymore than matinee or video rental prices. Whatever It Takes is about as memorable as my high school prom, which I did not attend.