Stop me if you’ve heard the one about a 14-year-old (Spencer Breslin), suffering from early-onset male-pattern baldness and bunions, who moves to a new town with his single mom (Ally Sheedy) and older sister; befriends a strange janitor, Cromer (Cuba Gooding, Jr.); faces down a bullying nemesis and needlessly cruel gym teacher; gets arrested for buying high school kids beer; and enters a go-kart race for revenge, glory and the heart of a girl. Yes, teen movie boilerplate gets skewed plenty good in Harold, co-written and directed by T. Sean Shannon, a Saturday Night Live veteran who manages to even work in a fantasy sequence highlighting his longstanding predilection for bears.

It’s intriguing for a movie built around hair that one of its wig works so well (Breslin’s chrome dome is sleek and realistic) and one doesn’t (Gooding’s asymmetrical ‘fro renders him a most curious Chia Pet). No mind, though. An assortment of cameos (Chris Parnell, Rachel Dratch, Dave Attell, Fred Willard and Colin Quinn — the latter the funniest) ups the intrigue factor here, but it’s Breslin who really carries the day, showcasing crackerjack comic timing throughout. There isn’t a lot of explanation as to why Harold is a crotchety fan of Murder, She Wrote if, in fact, the small town in which he originally lives is so accepting of his condition, other than it makes for simple visual amusement — a kid reading a newspaper in a Barcalounger, and hassling other, younger kids about their baseballs in his yard, messing up his vegetables. There’s also the lingering question of audience — for most of its running time, Harold isn’t quite barbed enough to truly be a film about adolescence yet aimed mainly at adults, though several late plot twists and double entendres up the ante. Sometimes, though, strange is just good, and the players here are good enough to sell the premise and milk some easygoing laughs, even if Harold is just an elongated comedy sketch. For more information on the movie, click here. (City Lights Pictures, PG-13, 93 minutes)