Mean Girls

Directed by Mark Waters

Starring Lindsay Lohan Rachel McAdams

Paramount

Rated PG-13

97 mins

Grade: B+

“Mean Girls,” written by and co-starring prized “Saturday Night Live” snark Tina Fey, is a deviously spiked punch bowl of a teen comedy. It’s an acidic, vinegary variation on the 1995 hit “Clueless,” a colorful, less malevolent “Heathers” for the post-Britney teen universe and a chance for Lindsay Lohan to prove that she is most definitely not the red-haired rival to blonde tween queen Hilary Duff.

Fey freely adapted “Mean Girls” from Rosalind Wiseman’s sociological treatise “Queen Bees ‘ Wannabes,” a sort of pop-psych textbook for parents on how to deal with the complex society of their teenage daughters: the boyfriends, the cliques, the popularity contests and the slander and gossip that comes with the territory of post-pubescence. The sharply astute “Mean Girls” is a kind of comic companion piece to last year’s “Thirteen.” That film was teen angst as hellish horror show, with the gifted Evan Rachel Wood slipping farther down into the abyss of adolescent torment in increasingly scary ways; this is more of a witty light comedy, playing on teenage backstabbing in nimble and funny ways.

“Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen” this certainly ain’t. Lohan was an insufferable, obnoxious brat in that movie, but here she displays the same winning mix of confidence, vulnerability and comic timing that she did in last summer’s fabulous redux of “Freaky Friday.” She’s a most appealing young actress, acting with moxie, verve and charm and she keeps us sympathetic to her “Mean Girls” character even when she does bad, bad things. If she avoids movies that make her prance around like a cut-rate, junior league Britney-wannabe (like, say, “Drama Queen”) than she may have a real career.

And her character does some bad, bad things. But she doesn’t start off that way. Lohan is Cady Heron, a new girl at the Chicago high school she’s attending after spending 12 years being homeschooled in Africa under the tutelage of her anthropologist parents. Her first day – a “surreal blur” in her words – is an awkward attempt to gain a foothold in the ways of a modern suburban high school; she spends her lunch alone in a bathroom stall.

Various cliques interested in her quickly recruit Cady. She’s befriended by the artsy outsiders, the mildly gothed out Janis (the terrific Lizzy Caplan) and the jovial Damian (Daniel Franzese), who’s “too gay to function” according to jaded Janis.

Then there are “The Plastics,” a trio of beautiful, shallow shrews who constitute the school’s in-crowd. They’re rich. They’re gorgeous. They’re powerful. And they are the cruelest of the school’s girls, spreading gossip and backstabbing “friends” with vicious aplomb.

Cady, being as attractive as she is, is swiftly brought into “The Plastics” mold by the group’s venomous queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams, of “The Hot Chick.”) Janis sees this as a prime opportunity for deep cover espionage, with Cady infiltrating “The Plastic’s” world and working to destroy it from the inside out. But the more that Cady spends in their backbiting world, and the more she learns about how good is to be the queen, the more she goes from being a false “Plastic” to a genuine one.

Cady tricks Regina into eating weight-boosting “diet” bars, turns her airheaded lackeys, insecure Gretchen (Lacey Chabert, “Party of Five”) and ditzy Karen (Amanda Seyfried), against her, and angles to steal away Regina’s sweet boyfriend Aaron (Jonathan Bennett) for herself, all the while slinking from sweet, shy new kid to sneaky, nasty witch.

It sounds like corny, teen-girl cheese, but Fey knows how and when to employ her trademark Ginsu-knife wit. The movie, directed with zest and vigor by Mark Waters (who did the deed on “Freaky Friday” too), bogs down in life lessons at the end – it backs away from being as dark and wicked a comedy as “Heathers” was – but even then Fey knows how to cut thorugh the sugar so that “Mean Girls” leaves you with the aftertaste of a Sour Patch kid in your mouth.

“Mean Girls” is spectacularly well cast for this kind of film; not one actor gives a singular false note. I could go on about how good Lohan is here – I’ve done it already – but that wouldn’t leave nearly enough space to praise McAdams, who has the same crack comic timing and a nicely rounded sense of youthful superiority, or Chabert, who gives her superficial wannabe a tinge of insecure feeling and steals scenes from both Lohan and McAdams. Ditto Franzese’s droll line readings. And the cast is stocked by a plethora of “SNL” veterans old and new, including Amy Poehler as Regina’s desperate to be cool mom, Tim Meadows as the beleaguered school principal and Fey herself as the math teacher Ms. Norbury, who’s dealing with divorce issues. Meadows and Fey demonstrate talents they’ve never gotten to show on the amped-up theatrics iof “SNL;” they each play their respective roles with subtle comic shadings and a great deal of sad dignity.

“Mean Girls” has a PG-13 rating, but that doesn’t mean that Fey doesn’t avoid cramming in as many deliriously, hilariously demented moments as possible. The movie has a merrily skewed spirit of sly satire, a tone of toothy black comedy dressed in the spangly rainbow colors of a high school princess. In otherwords, it’s a savage and gutsy comedy dressed in the costume of a girlish Saturday night movie. By the time it reaches the end, “Mean Girls” wants to lecture its target audience on all the bad that comes from calling each other “fat” and “sluts.” It gets all saccharine and righteous on us, but that’s okay, seeing as how the bitter medicine helps the spoonful of sugar go down.