For the most part, teen movies today trend the following ways: taut teen bodies and a smattering of fart jokes and bodily fluids, hand-drawn titles and indie shoegazing music and girls in glasses and Mikey Cera, or castrated romances where a vampire (and the audience) repress their urges to bite the stuffing out of everyone.

You know what would be novel? A slightly diminutive, scruffy, unfashionable main character who spends his weekends catch-and-releasing locusts, who listens to a cassette of Tchaikovsky — not hidden in headphones, but from the player stuffed in his backpack, who can befriend beautiful girls simply by being kind, interesting, smart and confident. A character who knows he’s a band nerd, but is not willing to play the subjugated, shuffling slave, knowing his strength is in being able to convince, say, the lovely new girl in town — 16 to his 14 — to follow him to an orchestra. Which, by the way, they have to walk to via sewers. When he points to a mansion, indicating his house, she is surprised. “You don’t look like you live there.” “That’s a compliment,” he responds.

If you updated the perms and the heavy soundtrack helpings of synth and Casio keyboards, “Lucas” would look positively ahead of its time today.

The boy, Lucas, played by the late Corey Haim, and the girl, Maggie, Kerri Green, have met and created one of those lovely, almost pre-adolescent, innocent summer friendships. Then — school starts.

Will Maggie sneer in revulsion as she realizes her friend is a swirlie-magnet geek? Will she get sucked into the “Mean Girls”/“Heathers” dynamic of piling into the back of an open convertible and hauling around to the nightly make-out party at the quarry?

In a rare move for teen movies, like actual high school kids, most of their life actually revolves around school. Lucas’s friends mourn for the old band teacher, who might have died of a tragic heart-attack or suicide. There’s an ongoing terrarium project Lucas collects bugs and dragonfly larvae for. Instead of shrieking and black eyes and backstabbing, the inevitable affections are illustrated in music class, during one of those big, wordless, slow, almost church choir-like songs.

And trying to win Maggie’s attention, Lucas actually makes his way into a game of football. Instead of slapstick, this results in what might be the most cerebral locker room banter scene ever.

Movie-making tip: Don’t make a movie about teenagers because you want an easy excuse to use hot young actors, because you need an easy setting and because you can’t think of a more natural way to end your scenes than the 3rd period bell. Make them because — like John Hughes and, in this case, David Seltzer — you remember how much being that age sucked, but how you fought hard and sometimes, managed to get some joy out of it, even when you thought you would never escape.

It’s not that movies like “Lucas” don’t get made at all anymore, but you’d never find the big studios putting today’s equivalents of Charlie Sheen, Corey Haim and Winona Ryder in them. They still make movies like “Lucas” — in Italy and Brazil and probably Russia. It’s too bad they just don’t make them here anymore.