Lucas (1986)

Starring Corey Haim, Kerri Green, Charlie Sheen,  and Winona Ryder.

Lucas is about a very smart 14 year old nerd, Lucas (Haim), who meets a beautiful new girl in town (Green). She joins the cheerleading squad, and falls in love with the friendly jock (Sheen), and Lucas is jealous. Ryder plays the female best friend, who is in love with Lucas, that appears at the right moments to give all of the good advice. Lucas attempts to impress the new girl by joining the football team, and he gets seriously hurt in a game. He never wins over the girl, but he gets over the fact that beautiful girls date beautiful boys, and he is not one of them, and their friendship continues as so.

The film makes a point of showing how alienated and pathetic Lucas is. I mean, his life just completely sucks. He's supposedly highly intelligent, shrimpy, interested in bugs, he lives in a trailer park with his alcoholic father, and he's annoying. If you ignore his character completely, you can believe it's just a simple love story between the new girl and the popular jock, but no. You can't. Lucas is the title character. The one nice thing I would say about the film is that it isn't a fairytale. It never pretends that a dorky little boy could end up with a pretty older girl. I could imagine this story playing out in real life, actually. Compared to the "follow your misguided dreams" films of today, this film is a breath of fresh air. And it's 27 years old! The ending, where Lucas walks up to his locker surrounded by his bullies and opens it to find a varsity letterman's jacket with his name on, after which his bullies begin a slow clap, is the most believable happy ending I've seen, perhaps ever. Overabundance of hallway applause and all.

I would recommend Lucas to anyone. It was actually a delightful film. I'd rate it a 6.

Lucas currently holds a 69% critic rating and a 66% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Lucas trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlpZwtkc0H8

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091445/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucas/