Starring Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne. Check listings for showtimes

YA author John Green has been accused of pandering to teens in books like The Fault in Our Stars and in his infamous vlog. But while no cinematic masterpiece, Paper Towns suggests the writer is a force for good in an increasingly troubled youthosphere.

On paper, Towns is yet another coming-of-age tale about a white boy growing up in privileged surroundings. His yearning for the unattainable dream girl across the street isn’t exactly novel. But the film version has a number of fresh things going for it, chief of which is the star-making presence of Nat Wolff as Quentin Jacobsen, an Orlando student whose straight-arrow trajectory gets interrupted by l’amour fou.

Wolff is already known, alongside brother Alex, for TV’s The Naked Brothers Band. (They’re the offspring of jazz great Michael Wolff and thirtysomething’s Polly Draper, who created the Nickelodeon series.) In his near-adult phase, Wolff wears his camera-cozy charisma lightly, with self-effacing quirks encouraging viewer identification with Quentin’s not-quite-shattering plight.

Specifically, the kid’s final weeks of high school are shaken by longtime heartthrob Margo, played by British model-turned-something Cara Delevingne. She’s unconvincing as an American free spirit all of Florida’s in love with, but is hardly in the movie, so that’s okay. After dragging our boy into a night of light mayhem—in revenge for betrayal by richie-rich pals this character, as written, would never tolerate for a day—she disappears, leaving complicated clues for him to follow. Road trip!

Green’s book was adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, who also scripted Stars and the slightly edgier (500) Days of Summer, and directed by Robot & Frank’s Jake Schreier. Their nearly parent-free view of gender and class roles, circa 2015, isn’t very deep, and is unusually plain-looking. But they leave generous room for Quentin and his nerdy-sweet besties, played memorably by Austin Abrams and Justice Smith, to act like real teenagers. Plus, you have to respect any story that builds its central mystery on the words of Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie.

If this be pandering, give us more.