The Perks Of Being A Wallflower feels very familiar. You could be forgiven for thinking this was because of stock teen characters and their predictable traits, but that would be unfair to this darkly sincere film. Whilst Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own novel has some issues, it feels familiar because he has captured a great deal of the universal adolescent experience in a character-driven film.

Logan Lerman stars as Charlie, an emotionally troubled youngster who has just begun high school in the early 1990s. To get through his testing days as classic outsider and wallflower of the title, he writes unsent letters to a ‘friend’ as he navigates the adolescent greenhouse in the wake of a deeply traumatic summer (for reasons not made explicit to begin with, at the very least).

However, he finds companionship in final year half-siblings Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller), joining their gang of misfit friends, (think one step up from Inbetweeners).  This helps him to blossom socially, but brings it own challenges – not least that of containing his feelings for the transfixing Sam. It feels like we’ve seen a lot of these characters before, but the young leads all pull them off with aplomb and freshness.

A standout is Ezra Miller, a young man destined for critical acclaim. Following up his simply astounding performance in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Miller does an excellent job portraying the engaging mix of confident wisdom and personal insecurity in the extroverted Patrick.

Much is down to Chbosky’s writing as well, of course, but in the wrong hands the character could easily have slipped into caricature. However, for the film as whole, much rests on the dynamic between Charlie and Sam. In this regard, Logan Lerman’s performance is superb in selling his character’s transfixion with the most thinly written character; Emma Watson’s Sam.

Sam is that special type of young woman you only seem to encounter in independent American cinema. She loves The Smiths, and openly talks about how cool they are (something I maintain folks like me shouldn’t do until they are at least 23). She loves Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ intuitively (quite how this group of youngsters born, presumably, in the late 1970s know Morrissey but not Bowie is a minor quibble). She buys typewriters for guys she likes. We’ve listened to this broken (vintage vinyl) record before.

Fortunately, Watson shows some potential as an actress beyond Hogwarts, and manages to sell this archetype with a confident but humble performance, which makes us understand why the younger Charlie could become so enamoured.

The narrative moves along well, even if it does perhaps meander around the middle in excessive deference to the book. Although it requires a third-act acceleration when examining the reason for Charlie’s fragile mental state, the balance of the personal character story and a more relatable one on the general adolescent experience is admirable. At once, the film captures the world-ending minutiae, the transient feeling of a social circle, and the undefined future as a source of both boundless optimism and crushing anxiety.