The unseemly sight of adorable Michael Cera gone super bad -- chain-smoking Gauloises, hissing vulgarities and vandalizing property -- is almost enough to recommend "Youth in Revolt."

But this tale of a sex-crazed teen who invents a nasty alter-ego in a perverse bid to seduce his dream girl has too many unfunny moments to justify more than a rental four months from now, when the target audience will have graduated to its own naughtiness anyway.

Set in Northern California but shot in rural Michigan (huh?), the long-delayed farce squishes author C.D. Payne's 600 pages of cult fiction into a coaster of a movie whose thin narrative is at once too much and not enough. Cera's hormonally juiced young dweeb, Nick Twisp, is introduced spending some quality time with himself before circumstances that are too belabored to recount bring him, his mom (Jean Smart) and her belching beau (Zach Galifianakis ) to a Christian trailer park. Here, the kid meets comely Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) and instantly falls head over hindquarters.

A hard-core Francophile, willfully inscrutable except to those who think that all females are ruthless, Sheeni seems to model her maybe/maybe-not routine on that of Jean Seberg's "Breathless" tease. When Mademoiselle Sheeni invites poor Nick to lube her up with sunscreen, then introduces him to her preppy boyfriend Trent (Jonathan B. Wright), what's a pitifully whipped boy to do but play Jean-Paul Belmondo?

Conjuring a "supplemental persona" with an ascot, white jeans and a pencil mustache, our hero becomes François Dillinger, and the movie turns into a sloppy version of the Farrelly brothers' "Me, Myself & Irene."

"Youth in Revolt" is wise to toy with Cera's gentle-as-a-kitten image at a time when that image is beginning to grate. And the actor -- essentially playing two parts, sometimes both at once -- riffs impressively on the notion that a teen's id needs not much coaxing to tear up the town. Still, a little Dillinger goes a long way without due direction from Miguel Arteta, whose "Star Maps" and "Chuck and Buck" went to more purposeful extremes.

Maybe the "Youth" market won't mind the squandering of Cera's middle-aged co-stars Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi and Fred Willard in one-dimensionally raunchy roles. However, those who remember "Something Wild," "Living in Oblivion," and "Best in Show" will consider it a bigger crime than that of Dillinger setting fire to a curiously Midwestern-looking Berkeley.