Cinema: Teen Turmoil SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL

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Now that Judy Blume is writing for grownups, we must regard John Hughes as her successor. His movies, like her young-adult novels, have good qualities. He knows what the teens' Top 40 moral issues are, and he places his stories in palpably realistic contexts. Not only do his kids speak up-to-the-minute adolescent idiom and illustrate the latest dress code perfectly, they attend clangorously class-conscious public high schools, whose unexamined values the protagonists must always challenge -- and defeat.

Some Kind of Wonderful rather too starkly exhibits Hughes' standard procedure. It has one of his attractive misfits, shy, sensitive Keith (Eric Stoltz) obsessively trying to steal popular, vapid Amanda (Lea Thompson) away from her rich, bullying boyfriend. Keith does not notice that his lifelong best buddy, Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson, who is fine), has, for all her tomboyish ways, grown into a much more interesting and sexy girl than Amanda. Or that she truly loves him. That recognition is for the last minute, and it teaches Keith, Amanda and the whole school lessons in personal integrity.

That, of course, is where fantasy slyly enters Hughes' movies. In real life, questioning the adolescent social structure usually ends in baffled hurt, not instructive triumph. When Hughes' characters and situations are intensely enough drawn (as in The Breakfast Club), one scarcely notices such manipulation. But Some Kind of Wonderful has not attained its full growth. Thin, gulpy, awkward, it stands before us, artlessly begging sympathy but betraying its creator's worst weakness.