Obvious lessons in ‘Acceptance’

The moms and dads in question live in suburban show homes, lap up statistics about test scores and college acceptance rates, and pressure their kids to apply to only name-brand institutions. They’re absurdly unaware of their teenagers’ inner lives and even their day-to-day doings. Joan Cusack, as the most neurotic mother in the bunch, proudly announces to her daughter that she found some information online by “Gurgling’’ it.

Mae Whitman plays the daughter, Taylor Rockefeller, a pouty good girl who is just rebellious enough to dye her bangs a faint shade of blue. She has a quirky-cute pathology (she steals other people’s mail) as well as a deeper, darker problem (she cuts herself), owing to the fact that her mother quivers a lot and pops pills, and her father (Mark Moses) is barely around.

Plus, she suffers from that delusion, promoted by college counselors and high-achieving teens, that your future is made or lost when the college acceptance letter arrives. She’s not alone; her ex-boyfriend Harry (Jonathan Keltz) dreams of Harvard so intensely that he wears a jacket and tie to school every day, while her friend Maya (Deepti Daryanani) tries to reconcile her love of poetry with her parents’ insistence that she go to MIT.

As the students try to figure out where to apply, an underdog college called Yates lands, through some magazine editor’s mistake, at the bottom of a 50-best-colleges list, leading to a flurry of new interest. Taylor takes one look at the ramshackle, wooded campus and decides it suits her perfectly, which makes her mother miserable. Cusack has made a career out of playing neurotics, but it’s still a little uncomfortable watching her here as a substance-abusing, skeletal woman who insists that her daughter must attend Wellesley or Yale. It’s as if she’s being punished for being such a slacker in “16 Candles.’’

Like the John Hughes movies of yore, “Acceptance’’ is supposed to be farcically funny. In truth, the effect is more mildly cute, as well as slightly confounding. We never learn enough about Yates to understand why it has so much appeal, nor enough about Harry to see what Taylor likes so much about him, nor enough about the various parents to believe it when they finally, predictably, come to their senses.

The movie, directed by Sanaa Hamri and based on a novel by Susan Coll, does get at something that’s true about the pressures on high school students today. But, like the title, with its mawkish double meaning, “Acceptance’’ pitches lessons that are fairly obvious: Be true to yourself; don’t worry about what other people think; don’t fret so much about the future. And don’t trust anyone over 18. But you probably knew that already.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to www.viewerdiscretion.net