Starring Joey King, Selena Gomez, and John Corbett. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 23, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

A searing study of bipolar disorder and its manifestation in troubled grade-schoolers, Ramona and Beezus also examines the disappearing middle class.

Okay, I’m reading too much into it. But I had to think about something during this amateurish domestic comedy aimed at preteens and absolutely no one else.

It’s easy to see the attraction to the playful kid-book series from Beverly Cleary, a nonagenarian still writing in California. In fact, there were previous attempts to bring her best-known creation to TV, notably in the late ’80s, with Sarah Polley as spunky Ramona.

I have nothing against Joey King, a helium-voiced pixie who here plays the spunky nine-year-old who is frequently at odds with the rest of the world. And as her older sister—dubbed Beezus by our pintsized heroine—Disney star Selena Gomez dampens her ego to allow the tyke to shine (at least away from the soundtrack). But the adults all suffer ritual humiliation at the hands of a dopey script by Laurie Craig and Nick Pustay and generally clueless direction by newcomer Elizabeth Allen.

There are some nice flights of low-budget animated fancy courtesy of production designer Brent Thomas, intended to capture Ramona’s out-of-control imagination, if not quite suggest rampant dementia. But these are too sporadic to buoy the movie’s spirits, and we are left with long, dull passages with John Corbett and Bridget Moynahan (why, oh, why?) as parents facing tough economic times.

Downright creepy is a subplot in which Ramona keeps subverting would-be lovers Ginnifer Goodwin and Josh Duhamel, and there’s also a teenage fumblefest between Beezus and a neighbour boy. What we’re left with is the disturbingly antiquated message that a girl can do anything she wants but she’s still only as good as the guy she can hook. Even if it’s Daddy.