Jacob Aaron Estes’ “Mean Creek” draws inspiration from a bone-dry cinematic aquifer: the teen morality play, specifically the one in which troubled, unsupervised youths blunder into a deadly dilemma of their own manufacture. Though not as relentlessly bleak as “River’s Edge” (1986) or Larry Clark’s “Bully” (2001), “Mean Creek” neither feels very meaningful. If anything, it reaffirms our dearly held vanity that our kids, deep down, are pretty much perfect.

Writer/director Estes propels the drama with several keenly drawn characters, including the nominal villain, George (Josh Peck from “Max Keeble’s Big Movie”), a fat middle-school flunky with an obsession for capturing his own image on videotape.

We’re never really sure if George is worthy of our sympathy; though maladjusted, he’s clever and mean-spirited and has a knack for finding someone’s insecurities and mercilessly pinching them.

With his self-obsessive tendencies and love of the spotlight, George is the kind of kid one imagines would make a really swell neurotic stand-up comic someday. Add a few inches, a few pounds and a few years of profligate cocaine abuse, and he could pass for Sam Kinison or one of
those insufferable twits on Colin Quinn’s “Tough Crowd.”

For now, George makes an irresistible target — too irresistible for Marty (Scott Mechlowicz) and Rocky (Trevor Morgan), a pair of pot-smoking high-schoolers who hold a grudge against George for beating up Rocky's younger brother Sam (“Signs” star Rory Culkin).

As a ruse, the older boys invite George down to the river near their Oregon home for a daylong rafting trip. In reality, they're hatching a scheme that will demean and humiliate him.

Estes has a talent for synthesizing the brutal diplomacy of the teenage years, and the movie briefly achieves a small degree of suspense as Sam and his friends — including gal-pal Mille (Carly Schroeder from “The Lizzie Maguire Show”) and sexually confused Clyde (Ryan Kelley) — agonize whether to follow through with their plans for George, who turns out not
to be quite as loathsome as everyone expected.

Ultimately, Estes selects the outcome that affords his young cast the most opportunity for benighted emoting and long, haunted close-ups (Schroeder is terrific, if a bit too precocious; Mechlowicz looks like he attended the Brad Pitt Academy of Pout and Glower).

In the final swirl, there seems to be very little point to it all; aside from the occasional illicit beer and mean joke, these are good kids, conscientious kids, kids with a sophisticated enough values system to say things such as “But if we hurt him, we'd be just as bad as him.”

Still, Estes is determined to offer them a stiff chastening, because that's what you’re supposed to do in hyper-real teen exposés such as this. The lesson doesn't stick, because in this case, the kids really are all right.