Juno MacGuff is sixteen. She lives in a small house in a modest neighborhood, drives a beat-up blue minivan, plays guitar in a band with her friends, uses a hamburger-shaped phone, drinks enormous blue slushies, chatters in (sometimes crude) slang, and “out of boredom” and bad judgment becomes pregnant by her best friend, Paulie Bleeker.

After a run-in with an abortion clinic, Juno decides on adoption and finds a married couple in the Pennysaver that wants a baby—and after her parents recover from the shock, they support her through the pregnancy. The adoptive parents (played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) seem ideal, but Bateman’s character is still dreaming of becoming a rock star, and he isn’t sure he’s ready for a baby at all.

In Juno (rated R for mature thematic material, sexual content and language), director Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking) does what he does best—takes a premise we’ve seen and flips its on its quirky head. Though it follows the now familiar accidental-pregnancy-as-a-growing-experience route (i.e., Knocked Up), Juno avoids getting mired in raunch, as screenwriter Diablo Cody apparently dares to believe that teenagers think about things other than sex. She dials up the slang just enough to make it the film’s aesthetic, and in a way, it’s like watching Shakespeare—once you get used to the vernacular, it’s brilliant.

As portrayed by the fantastic Ellen Page, Juno isn’t like many conventional high school movie heroines. Rather, she lives in jeans and plaid button-downs and freely acknowledges the stupidity of her actions. Paulie (Michael Cera, endearingly innocent and geeky) is smitten with her intelligence and wit as much as her smile.

Because of its themes and language, Juno is a film for mature audiences, but it presents an honest, funny, good-hearted story about maturing, learning to love, and growing through mistakes.

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