Starring Bow Wow, Chi McBride, and Meagan Good. Rated PG. Now playing at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Roller skates get the old-school treatment in Roll Bounce, an assembly-line comedy that occasionally hits some personal notes amidst the coming-of-age tropes.

Rapper-actor Bow Wow, who ain't Li'l no more, plays Xavier, a motherless high schooler in a lower middle-class suburb on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s. X, as he's known, lives to roller skate, but when the ratty neighbourhood rink shuts down, he and his pals are forced to head north, to the gleaming roller-disco environs of Sweetwater, where they must face up to a feared skate monster called Sweetness and his multicultural crew of wiggers and chiggers.

The black-talking white and Asian folks are just one aspect that rings false for 1976. There's a lot more attention paid to hairstyles than period patois. I mean, street kids didn't say whatever at the end of every sentence during the Nixon era-although maybe they should have. (Stanley Clarke's soundtrack isn't always Good Times correct either, but it is always good.)

The movie has other problems. The biggest is that director Malcolm D. Lee (one of Spike's cousins and the man behind Undercover Brother) has little flair for comedy. The establishing scenes are logy when they should crackle, and the attempts at slapstick are weaker than the skate scenes, which manage to raise some energy even when the actors' heads are cut off half the time.

Despite its many clichéd elements, the film does come alive in the dramatic parts, especially when it digs into X's relationship with his wounded father (the excellent Chi McBride), an aeronautical engineer who lost his wife and now can't seem to catch a break from the Man. And the lad's sharp-tongued camaraderie with his male friends, as well as new neighbour Tori (Jurnee Smollett), has the tang of truth to it. Thanks to Beauty Shop screenwriter Norman Vance Jr., there's a lot of inside chatter about hair and skin shades you don't usually get from urban comedies aimed at white teens.

I also liked a subplot, undeveloped as it was, involving X's stumbling thing for a pretty childhood friend he hadn't seen in years-mainly because she is so sweetly played by Meagan Good, who just as convincingly went bitchy in D.E.B.S. Of course, it's not clear why Roll Bounce needed two ugly-duckling scenarios to play out. But whatever.