Your Favorite TV Show, Only Dirtier

[Emma]

The best episode of "Everwood" you've never seen, "Nearing Grace" provides a fix for addicts of the now cancelled WB series who've been aching for their favorite show since it went off the air.

Starring "Everwood" lead Gregory Smith in the Ephram-like role of Henry Nearing, this movie has all the hallmarks of that show: small-town life, confused dads, dead moms, and hurting sons engaging in snappy patter with their sexually and emotionally blunt girlfriends. This being a motion picture, there's more explicit sex and drug use, but otherwise this is the "Everwood" feature film that never was. It probably doesn't help that Mr. Smith was playing Ephram in Season 3 of "Everwood" while simultaneously shooting "Nearing Grace."

Henry is that stalwart of the indie movie: a bright, young cutie-pie with a limitless vocabulary stuck in a small town. In this case, his prison cell is New Jersey, and his warden is his father, Shep, who's lost in alcoholic free-fall after the death of his wife. Dropping out of school to discover the meaning of life, Henry winds up entangled in sex games between a lethal hottie (Jordana Brewster) and her lacrosse-playing boyfriend (Chad Faust). Henry also has to deal with an acid-head brother (David Moscow) and a best friend (Ashley Johnson) who's in love with him.

It all sounds a bit like a John Hughes movie gone ultra-serious, like "Some Kind of Wonderful" forced to crossbreed with "Pretty in Pink," and its metaphor for escape is so ham-handed that only Mr. Hughes could have come up with it: Henry has a plane and a pilot's license and he dreams of running away on it and flying from town to town across America. Like an overachieving class valedictorian, "Nearing Grace" isn't even content to settle for one teen movie ending, and instead has two: a prom night blowout and a graduation ceremony speech that's (wait for it) straight from the heart.

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