This tale's a positive development

''Hoot," the new film adapted from Carl Hiaasen's 2002 young-adult novel, isn't the most elegantly made movie. Writer-director Wil Shriner comes from TV -- he made a lot of ''Frasier" episodes -- and it shows. Close one eye and you could mistake the film for an After School Special.

So what? ''Hoot" tells kids they can make a difference in this world, and that's worth a hundred ''Ice Age 2"s. Of the several different messages knocking around in the movie -- overdevelopment is bad, nature is good, don't stand on a golf course during peak drive-time -- the most effective is the simplest: You have more power than you think.

After six relocations in eight years, 13-year-old Roy Eberhardt (Logan Lerman) is once again the new kid in town, instantly preyed on by the bullies who ride the bus with him to Florida's Coconut Cove Middle School. As Roy is getting thrashed one day, he glimpses a barefoot boy (Cody Linley) running at blinding speed alongside the bus, and his curiosity grows into an obsession.

Someone, meanwhile, keeps vandalizing the wooded construction site where a Mother Paula's Pancake House franchise is about to be erected, and it's driving site foreman Curly (Tim Blake Nelson) crazy. Kind but dimwitted town cop Dave Delinko (Luke Wilson) tries to catch the culprit but has his cruiser windows spray-painted black when he falls asleep on night watch. In his high-rise office in the city, Mother Paula regional manager Chuck Muckle (Clark Gregg) fumes and shouts.

They're all helpless against the barefoot boy, who turns out to be a military school runaway nicknamed Mullet Fingers (because, uh, he can catch mullets with his fingers). He, in turn is cared for by his stepsister Beatrice (Brie Larson), a fearsome middle school soccer jock who keeps Roy and other nosy parkers at bay. The movie hints just enough about the miserable home life of these two for us to be glad we don't know more.

Why do these kids care about a parcel of dirt? Because the holes in the ground are filled with burrowing owls and their young -- endangered species that Muckle would just as soon bulldoze. The movie takes a longer view as well, wondering how much building is too much in a fragile ecosystem like Florida (or, it's implied, your own town). Says Mullet Fingers, ''As long as I've been growing up here, I've been watching this place disappear."

He's the Edward Abbey-style nature boy of the film, in touch with the manatees and dedicated to monkey-wrenching the Man. Roy is a more lawfully minded kid and his ethical dilemma is the film's. I see by my daughter's book report that Hiaasen's novel delved more deeply into these issues, but they're present in the movie and well worth chewing over when the lights come up.

''Hoot" comes from Walden Media, the small ''family values" studio that has been turning thoughtful young-adult books like ''Holes" and ''Because of Winn-Dixie" into solid little movies (and that successfully rolled the dice on ''The Chronicles of Narnia" last year). The movie balances cardboard comic bad-guys with believable teenagers, has the courage to avoid romance, and unlike most Hollywood films suggests parents can be helpful and loving as well as clueless. (Parrothead alert: Jimmy Buffett coproduced the film, sings on the soundtrack, and has a role as Roy's very laid-back science teacher.)

The one thing ''Hoot" gets wrong is the title. Burrowing owls grumble, chatter, scream, and say ''coo-coo," but they don't hoot, and as far as I can tell that's a great horned owl dubbed onto the soundtrack. But the film nails the sound of a young person getting empowered, which is all that matters.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.