'DUFF' an outdated, dubiously relevant mess

In the era of Mo'ne Davis and the groundbreaking "Like a Girl" campaign, "The DUFF" feels like crumbs from a dated, hopelessly retrograde table.

Based on Kody Keplinger's young adult novel, this high school rom-com is tricked out in rhetoric of independence and self-discovery that give it a pseudo-feminist sheen. But, between its grating heroine, strident speechifying, derivative plot and draggy tone and tempo, it's like the redheaded stepchild of "Mean Girls" and "Freaky Friday."

Of course, redheaded stepchildren are precisely the kind of people "The DUFF" aims to redeem and celebrate. Bianca Piper (Mae Whitman), a plucky high school senior with a taste for zombie movies and overalls, is perfectly content with her place in the teenage pecking order, including playing third banana to her gorgeous best friends Casey and Jess (Bianca A. Santos, Skyler Samuels) and remaining largely invisible to the class queen bee Madison (Bella Thorne). But when Piper's hunky neighbor Wesley lets slip that she's her clique's DUFF - Designated Ugly Fat Friend - Bianca descends into a spiral of self-doubt, enlisting Wesley to coach her in the ways of feminine beauty and maybe even snagging her big crush, a guitar-playing Adonis named Toby, for a date.

Directed by Ari Sandel, who won an Oscar for his witty 2005 short film "West Bank Story," this far clunkier enterprise is a drag from its first moments, when Bianca curtly narrates her high school's in-group hierarchy of "jocks, geeks and princesses," and continues as she regales her friends with foul-mouthed put-downs.

Bianca isn't fat or ugly, but she isn't terribly kind or sympathetic, either: Played with less warmth than brisk efficiency by Whitman, she makes a dubious protagonist, especially when all of her energies seem geared toward making herself more "superhot and popular." (She doesn't get much support on the home front, where her single mom, played by Allison Janney in a thankless turn, runs a self-help mini-empire and cluelessly expounds on the virtues of power suits.)

Though "The DUFF" purports to be told from a female point of view, it's the male characters who really pop. As the none-too-bright but essentially good-hearted Wesley, Robbie Amell channels the rakish twinkle of "Risky Business"-era Tom Cruise; Nick Eversman, as Toby, projects a canny combination of fey mellowness and sharp-eyed self interest.

Sandel and screenwriter Josh A. Cagan do their best to make "The DUFF" relevant in an age of social media (with on-screen hashtags and animations), divorce and cyberbullying. But what might have been a frank portrayal of high school culture and challenges ends up veering between being either too cynically hypersexual or preachy.

All of "The DUFF's" most troubling contradictions - between autonomy and male approval, artifice and authenticity - come to an uneasy head in its climactic scenes, which hew to the most depressingly conventional happy endings of yore. If the filmmakers were trying to provide a new way for high school girls to think about self-image, social control and identity, perhaps they should have listened to those deathless lines from "Mean Girls": Stop trying to make "The DUFF" happen. It isn't going to happen.