The surprise hit of the Telluride Film Festival, Juno is not quite the unqualified masterpiece that the breathless buzz might lead you to believe: its high-concept slanguage sometimes feels over-written, its visual style can get a bit too twee, and there are two or three bridge scenes in the third act that feel like imports from a much stupider movie. But in a year heavy on halfway-decent studio-supported sex comedies, Juno stands out for successfully plumbing the subversively bittersweet depths that Knocked Up strove for but mostly missed. It’s a crowd pleaser, it’s a tear jerker, and even if it doesn’t completely reinvent the genre, it does move a few fairly familiar sitcomish situations in exciting directions.

Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls. Juno (played by Ellen Page) is a boyish, foul-mouthed, kitsch-steeped, irony-packing, hoodie-wearing, Iggy Pop-worshiping smart-ass. She’s savvy enough to understand that the bully who mocks her does so to disguise his crush, but she lacks the self-awareness to truly comprehend her power over men and boys.

In a burst of genuine passion disguised as boredom, Juno swaps virginities with her best friend Bleeker, a lithe, brainy track star played by Michael Cera. We see their single sexual encounter through Juno’s gaze, in brief, golden-hued flashbacks which allude to Juno’s deeper feelings, but when the teenager discovers she’s pregnant, she knee-jerk plays it cool. She arranges to give the baby up for adoption to a couple of grunge-nostalgic yuppies (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and almost unwittingly distances herself from Bleeker the baby daddy. A horribly inappropriate love triangle ensues.

In Superbad, Michael Cera fantasizes about a world in which “girls weren’t weirded out by our boners, but actually wanted to look at them.” Juno takes place in that world, and as such it seems like a much more faithful representation of real-world teen sexual dynamics than Superbad, which ultimately canonizes Cera’s character for rejecting his crush object’s aggressive advances. Juno initiates her own deflowering by tackling Bleeker on a Lay-z-Boy. She regrets getting pregnant (not least because it physically blocks her and Bleeker from resuming their relationship), but she has no qualms admitting that the sex itself was “magnificent.” And Juno is hardly the only girl in town with a non-neurotic passion for, as she puts it, “pork swords.” Even the teenage receptionist at the abortion clinic recommends a flavored condom with the dreamy endorsement, “It makes my boyfriend’s junk taste like pie.”

I’m most impressed with the center section of the film, in which the very pregnant Juno drifts back and forth between her clear connection to the biological father of her baby, and her mounting curiosity concerning her child’s would-be adoptive dad. Variety’s Todd McCarthy, in an otherwise exceedingly positive review, bristled at “the queasiness of this midstream section.” I found it to be a faithful representation of the dynamic that often creeps up between culturally-savvy young women and the older men who, in some stab at reclaiming their youth, often transform from surrogate older brothers to sexual predators. As written by Cody, Juno is not free from culpability concerning the older man’s feelings, but she is, as the character admits, in way over her head when it comes to dealing with them. For all of Juno’s composure concerning her own sexual pleasure, the character is so steeped in affectation and cynicism that she can’t possibly fathom herself as a romantic object.

The film works best when director Jason Reitman lets Page, Cera and Jason Bateman spin Cody’s script into gold without letting his tendency towards stylization get in their way. Bateman is particularly good; Arrested Development fans knew he could do straight-man comedy, but here he shows unexpected depth, and manages to turn a married man longing for a girl less than half his age into a sympathetic figure.

Like Knocked Up, Juno is a sometimes-contrived story of ill-conceived sex turning into love, but the latter film offers the sex-com revival a much-needed reflection of the complexities and confusions of female desire.