If you’ve seen many films at all these past few years, Lucas may seem familiar. Painfully familiar. It’s the story of a fourteen-year-old nerd falling in love for the first time. Dramatists have been working up variations on this theme since long before Romeo ogled Juliet, but there have been few recent improvements in the time-honored tale of boy-meets-girl.

If Lucas is not an improvement on that hackneyed plot (and it isn’t), it does at least manage to salvage some of the respectability lost at the hands of teen sexploitation flicks....