It takes you back to the world we all lived in for four years. Here, high school is the epitome of identity and existence. Senior year must be lived with great melodrama and self-importance because after graduation, life becomes a gaping black hole of uncertainty.

So it is that four friends decide they cannot leave high school without having sex. ("We can't go to college virgins. They probably have special dorms for people like us.")

Kevin (Thomas Ian Nichols) and his girlfriend Vicky are at the bittersweet end of a high school romance. They obsess about the L-word and the Big O. Sex becomes an inevitable and strangely joyless rite of senior year.

Meanwhile, Oz — a romantically challenged lacrosse star — discovers his inner Backstreet Boy to win the love of a sweet girl who looks about 12.

Finch is the group's dark horse. The first time he levels a withering gaze at the camera, makes a Latin joke and tosses back a mochaccino, it's easy to assume his inner life is deep in the closet, and his high school pursuit is lettering in Oscar Wilde. But no, he's just languid and jaded beyond his years.

Then there's Jim. Judging from hilarious bonding scenes with his dad (Eugene Levy), he is a second-generation geek. Who would be pathetic, if he weren't so likeable. Who might have a future, if he wasn't an Adam Sandler lookalike. Jim's got porn, he's got condoms, he's got a live internet feed and, God knows, he's horny. He's just incapable of talking to girls. What does the poor lad have to talk about? His porn, his stockpiled condoms, the time his mom caught him jerking off to static on the Playboy channel or his tragic inability to recognize an analogy?

Nevertheless, Jim manages to be the most engaging character in the movie, probably because he is the most honestly needy, the most clueless and the least assured. He's a victim of his own bodily functions and the butt of urban legends (the kid who tried to screw a pie, the kid who tried to do it on the internet...).

If they ever make a movie in which the female characters really matter — beyond the fact that she must be lovely, wide-eyed, young and wear sweater sets with butterfly accessories — I'll be happy to write something about them, too. The only girl with a real identity is the world-wise Jessica (Natasha Lyonne), who wisely wears headphones to her own senior prom, as if she alone knows that life is bigger than a yearbook. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Alyson Hannigan also makes a funny appearance as a band nerd/dominatrix.

The sexual content stays tame, although it has one gratuitous exploit-the-foreign-exchange-babe scene. (If you're keeping moral score, does it make you feel better if it ultimately exposes the weakness of men and no one profits from evil?)

Remember Elaine on Seinfeld, criticizing the overwrought lovemaking in The English Patient? "Come on! Give me something I can use!" There might be something here that Pie's young target audience might find instructional. (Between South Park and Pie, the clitoris is getting a lot of free P.R. this summer.) Then again, maybe not.

When it comes to the giddy and mortifying truths of teen sex, the R-rated American Pie serves nothing that Dawson, Felicity or Loveline can't do with more style. There's certainly no reason to card anyone for the dubious privilege of seeing it.