‘Superbad' more pathos than prurience. Beneath its horny-boy trappings, the movie has something to say about friendship and growing up.

Please, a round of applause for the tortured, socially impaired high school outcast. Can you imagine a world without him? Who would grow up to write our TV sitcoms, master our Web sites and fume eloquently on our talk radio airwaves? Without the crucible of teenage dysfunction, who would be interesting?

Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen understand. As the writer-producer and writer-producer-star, respectively, of “Superbad,” the longtime pals deliver a big, heartfelt love letter to nerd nation. This is not some up-with-geek fetish piece, a la “Napoleon Dynamite,” or a randy gang-comedy along the lines of “American Pie,” but a saga of adolescent yearning as sensitive as it is explosively funny. To indulge a facile comparison, it's “The “Shawshank Redemption” of teenage sex comedies - a sometimes-crude, always-hilarious love story with something real to say about friendship and personal growth.

One imagines that Goldberg and Rogen weaved a bit of their own nerd DNA into Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera), a pair of picked-on, late-blooming high school seniors who - in lieu of healthy, satisfying social lives - have retreated into a fortified bunker of co-dependence. Neither has a girlfriend, but it's not for lack of interest. Seth, the overweight, sex-obsessed one, is convinced that a booze-soaked party is his sole salvation from the horror of virginity. Evan, painfully shy, just wants the courage to chat up the newly nonawkward swan (Martha MacIsaac) in his home room.

Riotously, Seth and Evan communicate in a colorful dialect of jabs and insults, the kind of R-rated repartee polished by too many lonely weekend nights pounding beers and watching movies. When Seth bemoans the fact that his only noteworthy sexual experiences happened early in high school, Evan is there with an apt, cinema-savvy rejoinder: “You're like Orson Welles.” Like “Knocked Up,” also penned by Goldberg, “Superbad” features the kind of spot-on, insiderish wordplay that serious pop culture junkies love best.

With summer vacation, and the end of their wonder years, fast approaching, the duo embarks on an all-night, mishap-filled quest for alcohol and female companionship. A stock plot device, certainly, but one noteworthy for its daring undercurrent of pathos (more than anything, Seth and Evan fear losing each other) and an outrageous subplot involving a classmate (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a fake ID (“McLovin” may prove to be the movie catch-phrase of the year) and a pair of beer-swilling cops (Rogen and “Saturday Night Live” regular Bill Hader).

Save for a slightly draggy finish, director Greg Mottola (“The Daytrippers”) exhibits few signs of rust after a decade-long hiatus from the big screen, and coaxes a wonderful performance out of Hill (“Accepted”). When Seth finally, irreversibly makes a drunken donkey of himself, all the pertinent emotions are there: shame, pain, blurry self-realization. Rarely does a character grow up so quickly, and rare is the actor who can pull it off so plausibly.

‘Superbad'

Stars: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Seth Rogen

Behind the scenes: Directed by Greg Mottola from a script by Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Rating: R for pervasive crude and sexual content, strong language, drinking, drug use and a fantasy/comic violent image - all involving teens

Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes

Grade: A-