Cast your mind back to high school.

No -- scratch that. Way too scary. Better to let Lindsay Lohan go there for you in Mean Girls, a fairly uptempo take on the horrors of the in-crowd, the out-crowd and the general adolescent cruelty available in abundance at so many institutions of higher learning.

Mean Girls has Lohan playing a fish out of water, a young woman who has grown up in Africa and been home-schooled all along. Then she is suddenly dropped into a huge American high school for her junior year.

Lohan's character has grown up outside the culture. That allows her to be a true innocent when she first encounters the rich, cruel, trendsetting girls of the school. She likewise doesn't know it's not cool to be excellent in math, doesn't see why she can't like certain boys and doesn't understand why the "outcasts" who first befriend her are socially off the chart.

What she learns and how she learns it are the focus of the movie, which is generally smart and often very funny. And there is a pearl of wisdom or two in there among the laughs.

The cast of Mean Girls includes Rachel McAdams as the dreaded Queen Bee rich-bitch, Jonathan Bennett as the cute guy, SNL's Tina Fey (who also wrote the screenplay) as an observant math teacher and Tim Meadows as the principal. For Lindsay Lohan, Mean Girls looks like a smart followup to last year's hugely successful Freaky Friday.

Mean Girls is about the things teens fear when it comes to popularity, friendships and fitting in. It's cute rather than hard-hitting, so the audience for the movie would seem to be pre-teens and young adolescents -- male or female -- and the beleaguered adults who must accompany them.

The movie is based on the bestselling and fantastically long-titled book by Rosalind Wiseman: Queen Bees And Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends And Other Realities of Adolescence.

(This film is rated PG)

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