Preppy heir Charlie Bartlett has made one too many fake ID for his boarding school and decides to try public school. There, he pines after the daughter of the principal, longs to be liked and he frets over his single mother. Fresh face Anton Yelchin, who plays the title role, eschews the easy swagger of the male Paris Hilton character he’s given. If he weren’t so damn charming, it would be a lot easier to dismiss “Charlie Bartlett” entirely.

The problem is that we never have to fret about him.

The hair-tearingly cliché scene of tie-wearing prep-out-of-water (Let’s all gawk, subject him to swirlie and question his sexuality!) is defused when charming Charlie wins his aggressor to his side to help sell his Ritalin.

He’s in love with the daughter of the principal (Robert Downey Jr.), but she immediately likes him too — not that it would be easy to resist his falsetto and drop-dead hilarious school play audition monologue about a young girl’s coming of age (really, the best minute of the movie).

And once he and Murph, the bully, finish the agonizing 15-second sell off of his Ritalin, the school is ready to rock out like Techno Viking. Naturally, they love their new boys’ room pharmacist.

It’s that plot point that has the most potential to turn “Charlie Bartlett” into a fatal overdose of carelessness. But thankfully, Charlie doesn’t only have a family psychiatrist on call from whom to get the pills he supplies to his peers. He plunges into the medical literature and has a natural passion for listening to people’s problems. To anyone who’s ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a bag full of samples of Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Ambien or Valium, Charlie doesn’t come off writing scripts any more casually than most medical professionals.

There are two nearly serious jams — a near death from overdosing (imagine that) and a near death from drunken-adult-with-gun (at least the filmmakers are even-handed). But the rapidity with which these threats are dispatched would be laughable were it not so destructive to the part of story-telling where you want your audience to sit and care and watch and wonder what happens.

Aside from his coming of age monologue (even in his prep school duds, he out-drag-queens Patrick Swayze in “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar”) there’s a spectacular 20 seconds in which he breaks into a breathless Birmingham accent and serenades Susan at his piano to “Yankee Doodle.” The rest of “Charlie Bartlett” comes off too strongly like a Mary Sue, a fantasy author-proxy (see also: “Twilight”).

Nice guys in high school don’t end up being cheered, their names chanted by ecstatic fellow students, every five minutes. However, there’s plenty enough about Yelchin in this film to make one plenty willing to see what he’ll do next.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.