Starring Lily Collins and Sam Claflin. Rated PG.

With her caterpillar eyebrows and kewpie-doll grin, Lily Collins is winsome enough to pilot a youth-aimed star vehicle. But there are no wheels on this un-smart car, and its cast must break multiple sweats to pull off clichés already stale-dated by the time of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

The title is your first tip-off, but if you think Love, Rosie is bland, it’s better than naming the film after Where Rainbows End, the YA book on which it’s based. Rosie is director Christian Ditter’s first work in English, after many German-language shows made for kiddies. Childish notions of romance, prefeminist claptrap (despite being written by women), and a deaf ear for dialogue are paramount in this tale of spunky Rosie (Collins) and lifelong best friend Alex (Sam Claflin, of the Hunger Games flicks). They are U.K. teens who somehow haven’t figured out that they’re truly, madly, deeply in whatchacallit—despite having had a drunken fumble on her 18th birthday.

The movie is sometimes frank in its sexuality, but ignorant of other facts of grown-up life. When Alex gets ready for Harvard Medical School (which has zero relevance to anything else in the story), Rosie settles for a similar-looking dude (Christian Cooke) back home and immediately gets knocked up. Naturally, an abortion is never considered, and even adoption is ruled out once she catches sight of her precious little girl—even though no real human connection is demonstrated over the next dozen years, at the end of which the daughter (Lily Laight) is presented as a fully sexualized object. And Rosie hasn’t aged a day.

These characters are mere collections of random yearnings, although Rosie does dream of opening a small hotel, simply because her dad’s the doorman at a posh establishment. (The over-coloured film was shot in Ireland and Ontario, subbing for England and Massachusetts, it seems.) Alex has a series of blond girlfriends, all of whom will be punished accordingly. In the end, Collins has just enough charm to sell this nonsense, but the dully handsome Claflin’s stammering stab at being a Hugh Grant for the One Direction set is laughable—and not in any way that’s good.