**** Superbad

Directed by Greg Mottola. Screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. With Jonah Hill, Michael Sera, Bill Hader, Seth Rogen and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. (R)

*** 1/2 Rocket Science

Written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz. With Reece Daniel Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D'Agosto and Vincent Piazza. (R)

This Friday will see the premiere of the most anticipated sequel of the summer: High School Musical II, in which the jocks, the nerds, and even that kid who likes to make crème brûlée can be expected to cross clique lines to sing about how they're "all in this together." I'd say the only people who believe that high school students eat their lunches in finely demarcated sections of the cafeteria are people who haven't been to high school yet, but when John Hughes invented the myth in the 1980s people said, "Oh yeah, high school was just like that." Perhaps, as in the way the White House managed to convince a good portion of the American public that Iraq was behind 9-11, Hughes' myth was repeated enough times that audiences confused it with their own memories. Then, for all I know, a younger generation took it as a guideline and — life imitating art — established their own cafeteria fiefdoms.

The truth of high school, as two very different releases this week show, is that social groups are much more fluid. In Superbad, the only division is between kids who go to parties and kids who don't. Rocket Science's Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) would merely ask, "What parties?" The fear is not of mean girls and football bruisers, but of adulthood. Sex is not something to practice on a pie. It is absolutely terrifying.

Superbad's foulmouthed Seth (Jonah Hill, who also appears in Rocket Science, as well as every other comedy this summer, or so it seems) deals with his terror with talk. Consumed by pornography and harboring the fear that he might be gay, his bravado only emerges when he's with his best friend Evan (Michael Cera of Arrested Development), whose shyness and sense of decency are keeping him from being a ladies' man. Even some of the girls, we find out, are still virgins. In these kids' hypersexualized culture, virginity is a dirty little secret — no one is getting any. And, in producer Judd Apatow's essentially conservative world, that's as it should be. Abstinence, as he showed in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, makes the heart grow fonder.

Abstinence is coincidentally the topic for the debate team in Rocket Science, the first narrative feature by Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound). Ironically, this much less libidinous film (although each season is marked with a teenage couple making out) actually takes the anti-abstinence side. Hal, who has been enlisted in the team by star debater Ginny (Anna Kendrick) — much to his surprise, since his stuttering is cruelly inhibitive — can't think of one good reason why teenagers should be abstinent. But when he forms a crush on Ginny, it seems less fueled by sexual desire than the need to have some continuity in his life. Hal's father has walked out, and his mother is having noisy sex with the father of a classmate. The other adults in Rocket Science (unlike the mostly invisible parents in Superbad) are struggling to maintain their sexual relationships as well. Ginny's neighbors are working out their sexual problems through a form of music therapy that involves playing Violent Femmes songs on the cello. Even Hal's speech therapist tells him, unsolicited, about his own experiment in open relationships. Hal knows that adulthood does not promise a neat, happy ending; he is, after all, a character in an independent film strongly influenced by the 1970s filmmaker he takes his name from, Hal Ashby.

Superbad is also besotted by the '70s, although, unlike Rocket Science, it does not take pains to erase cell phones from its world. Driven by a score played by former members of Parliament Funkadelic, this tightly scripted excursion into the one-crazy-night genre — written by Seth Rogen (the star of Apatow's Knocked Up) and Evan Goldberg when they were teenagers — finds Seth and Evan warily hooking up with deluded nerd Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to buy liquor for a party. About to graduate and go to different colleges, they've spent four years hiding out together, making this their first foray into the high school party scene. But along the way they detour into an adult party that is infinitely more terrifying, with free-flowing drugs and bloody brawls that seem to break out every few minutes. (In Rocket Science, Hal takes a detour to the scary adult world of Trenton, New Jersey.) After they've passed through this hell, the challenges of high school socializing seem infinitely less threatening. Although the night doesn't go as planned, it effects the boys' symbolic parting on a mall escalator the next day, potential girlfriends by their side. Seth and Evan must declare their love for each other and then move on to a happy and heterosexual adulthood. This is, after all, a Hollywood movie, even though it was shot on Hi-def video and sets new standards for verbal obscenity.

In contrast, Rocket Science, even though its New Jersey high school seems curiously depopulated, looks like more than its 4?5 million bucks, with cinematographer Jo Willems using the deadpan framing that's become expected in movies about brainy outsiders. While Rogen and Goldberg's screenplay's vulgarity camouflages its strict adherence to Aristotelian principles, Blitz uses an unapologetically literary narrator to not only articulate what the stuttering Hal cannot but also what Blitz himself has not articulated dramatically. But if Blitz's reliance on telling instead of showing makes his film less artistically successful, it is no less worth your time.

*** El Cantante

Directed by Leon Ichaso. Screenplay by Leon Ichaso and David Darmstaedter & Todd Anthony Bello. With Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, John Ortiz, Nelson Vasquez and Federico Castelluccio. (R)

Hector Lavoe was the voice of salsa at its birth in the nightclubs of the Bronx, a gifted improviser whose streetwise lyrics gave voice to the burgeoning political identity of Puerto Rican Americans. His meteoric rise to fame brought with it a heroin addiction, a suicide attempt, and death from AIDS at the age of 46. It would be nice to see a movie about him someday. Until then we'll have the unabashedly entertaining El Cantante, starring executive producer Jennifer Lopez as Lavoe's ballbusting, coke-snorting wife Puchi. If anything, this movie will allay any doubts about Lopez's acting chops. If only she'd let husband Marc Anthony finish a song.

Based on interviews conducted with Puchi (née Nilda Georgina Román) before her death in 2002 and recreated by Lopez in raw black and white, El Cantante is very much the story of a widow claiming a piece of her husband's legacy, even as the script hints at her unreliability. When Lavoe gets another woman pregnant, she's presented as a passing fancy, when in real life he was carrying on a relationship with her concurrently. When the couple fights, we see Puchi crying after Hector has left the apartment. Where he's gone seems of less concern than Lopez's period-perfect wardrobe (panty lines under the Quiana, even).

It's not Anthony's fault that Lavoe remains a cipher throughout — he just doesn't seem to get much screen time. The singer's phenomenal range has been restrained in deference to Lavoe's less musical instrument, and his mimicry of Lavoe's awkward and ungainly onstage posture and gestures is on the money.

As in Picturehouse's other summer release about a drug-addicted singer with a colloquial French stage name who died in her mid-forties, Lavoe's lyrics are translated in distressed fonts dropped in on various parts of the screen, to attractive affect. The music is mixed so hot it threatens to burn up the optical track, and although we see little of Lavoe's improvisational skills, a sequence in which Anthony sings "Aguanile" cut with images of his character being exorcised by a Santerian priest is genuinely chilling.

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