Terry Zwigoff, the documentarist who anatomised the heart of Robert Crumb's America, has brought off one of the funniest yet most lugubrious films of the year.

This is the movie version of Daniel Clowes's graphic novel about Enid and Rebecca - terrific performances from Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson. They are two high-school graduates who airily refuse the college option and strive to keep the hothouse flower of their friendship alive in the cold outside world of finding apartments and low-paying jobs in giant malls.

It is co-written by Clowes and Zwigoff, who have subtly toned down both the humidly sexy parts of the original cartoon and the fraught, close-knit relationship of the young women themselves, in favour of Enid's odd, touching love affair with an older man.

Played by Steve Buscemi, he's a snaggle-toothed, introverted loser with a passion for arcane Americana and jazz 78s. He is clearly a composite of the "Clowes" cameo in the original, and the Crumb disclosed in the Zwigoff documentary. Buscemi, though, avoids typecasting with a gentle, moving characterisation of a man who, with fatherly tact, declines to take sexual advantage of Enid's infatuation - but then succumbs, causing broken hearts all round.

It is an engaging account of the raw pain of adolescence: the fear of being trapped in a grown-up future and choosing the wrong grown-up identity, and, of course, the pain of love, which we all learn to anaesthetise with jobs and mundane worries.

It is more muted and languid than Sam Mendes's American Beauty, the movie in which Birch made her name, but it has charm and creates its own weightless universe of dreamy suburban ennui.

• At the UGC tonight, and Glasgow Film Theatre on Tuesday. Box office: 0131-623 8030.