Better Luck Tomorrow

Justin Lin's debut has all the elements that students get drilled into them in screenwriting class. There's an intriguing opening shot, some smart dialogue, a troop of appealing and finely delineated characters, and a trick ending.

Then there are the things professors can't teach. For instance: A filmmaker should not enslave himself to style to a point where the movie can't recover its common, moral sense. "Better Luck Tomorrow" opens smart and closes way over its head.

The emphasis here is on four high-school overachievers. They're young, gifted and Asian — they're also suburban and want for nothing, which means they've absorbed the trappings of hip-hop and have turned to lives of crime. Cheat sheets are manufactured, drugs are dealt, drugs are used, and soon, someone has to die. The victim gets his due for reasons that are wildly hypocritical. But Lin would prefer to play up his quartet's illogical, immoral transgression as radical comeuppance. (He, of course, would be wrong.)

"Better Luck Tomorrow" does have its strengths — its collection of Asian-American teens come off as lost and disaffected, as if some Japanese youth-movement director had made a mostly-boy episode of "My So-Called Life." But the director sacrifices finesse to run around in the baggy duds of a lurid gangsta flick looking for street cred.

Lin is working in two moral universes — crossing John Hughes' outcasts desperate to be noticed with Martin Scorsese's conflicted bad boys desperate to be better. "Better Luck Tomorrow" feels deformed by its faulty genetic code. Toward the end, the director grudgingly concedes that these guys are trying on rebellion. By that point, though, he's failed to unmix his message. Murder is bad, but it's an inconsequential phase a kid passes through, like marching band or acne.

"Better Luck Tomorrow" is rated R for frequent use of strong sex-related profanity, violence (gunplay and a graphic beating), simulated drug use (cocaine), simulated sex and female nudity. Running time: 101 minutes.