Chances are, if you went to school with someone like Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), you hated his guts. He's the kind of self-centered attention monger that makes the rest of the kids in his class cringe. Fear of being mistaken for someone like Max is what kept everyone quiet in your Freshman Comp. class-or, perhaps your class had a Max Fischer who did most of the "discussing."

The trick to Rushmore is its ability to focus on that type of grating personality without turning you against the character. Imagine the way a principal must feel watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off and you have an idea of the reluctant attraction we feel to Rushmore's unlikely protagonist. You see, Max may be the most annoying student at Rushmore Academy (from the way he insists on writing everything in calligraphy to that aggravating mole on his cheek), but we pity him for the secret he keeps.

Unlike the other kids, Max attends the elite school on a scholarship. He's the son of a humble barber (Seymour Cassel) instead of a rich lawyer or doctor, so he takes nothing about his education for granted. In fact, Max is so absorbed in his environment that he has actually lost sight of academics for the school's extra-curricular offerings.

Max runs just about every club on campus, and in his free time (considering his obligations, I can't figure out how he has so much of it), he initiates new organizations. His slumped posture and slack under-bite make Max a close visual match with The Graduate's Benjamin Braddock, though Max is entirely different. He refuses to stand back and let his life happen; God save anything that dares to cross his path.

The Max everyone at Rushmore sees is a loud-mouthed show-off, parading everywhere in his school blazer (which he continues to wear to the local public high school after the dean expels him from Rushmore). To look at Max a little more closely is to discover his weakness: everything about him is an act, a plea for acceptance from his peers. Inspect his costume and you'll notice a ratty pair of tennis shoes that give him away. Max may boast that he's thinking of Harvard as a backup choice for college, but he has no intention of leaving the sheltered universe he has created for himself at Rushmore.

Somehow, wealthy Rushmore alum Herman Blume (Bill Murray, putting his droopy eyes and comic timing to superb use) sees through Max's act, recognizing something of himself in the young man's personality. Blume has children, two moronic brats he'd rather not think of as his own, which only facilitates his connection with Max. To make up for the disappointing products of his gene pool, Blume chooses to treat his peculiar tenth-grade companion as his protégé.

As it turns out, the pair forge their friendship at a very inopportune time, for Max has just decided he is ready to conquer love. Max's experience with relationships is nothing more than the sum of his school-yard boasts about imaginary sexual exploits.

Using Blume as his go-between, Max selects a first-grade teacher (Olivia Williams) as the object of his affection, planning his seduction as yet another project. For all we know, Max might just as well be gay, though Rosemary Cross poses a challenge he is unwilling to turn down. Romance plays no part in his crush, though we somehow overlook the heartlessness of his newest little escapade. To complicate matters, Miss Cross seems a little more tolerant of Blume's advances.

From its promising foundations, Rushmore degenerates into a disappointingly stale love triangle as Max and Blume compete for Miss Cross's attention. Their insignificant battle escalates as they orchestrate a series of childish pranks for revenge, winning cheap laughs from the audience while diluting the film's potential.

Watching Rushmore in an audience roaring with laughter reminded me of the way I felt gritting my teeth through the off-color jokes of In the Company of Men as those around me laughed. There's a streak of cruelty to Rushmore's sense of humor, which manages to dissect the pains of growing up with alarming insight and cynicism.

Writers Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson juggle at least two great story ideas with Rushmore, and their final product is hurt only by their decision to combine them. I would have liked to see something more concrete evolve from the relationship between the prematurely mature Max and the childish Mr. Blume.

Secondly, there is merit in making a character who considers himself invincible face ultimate disappointment, falling in love with a teacher who could never return his feelings. However, this aspect of the story might have worked better if Anderson had kept Blume out of the picture. If Miss Cross were still married, rather than being conveniently widowed, Rushmore might have turned out to be our decade's clever reversal of The Graduate.

Both Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson graduated from UT, though neither has ties to the university's Radio-Television-Film department. A philosophy major, Anderson uses his distance from a true film-school background to Rushmore's advantage. In Anderson and Wilson's previous film, Bottle Rocket, an inattention to story structure and a shaky grasp of editing made a meandering mess of the light, entertaining story of two guys who haplessly decide to plan a life of crime.

Though Rushmore's technique is only moderately more professional than what we find in Bottle Rocket, Anderson's emerging directorial style seems fresh and personal. I think that most of the originality for which the film has been praised traces back to a snappy editing job. Max has a knack for cutting right to the bone with his insults, but the film skillfully translates gibes that border on cruelty into laughs.

Watch carefully how film editor David Moritz orchestrates a laugh from a relatively mundane slapstick gimmick as Mr. Blume trips while climbing over a fence. By slicing a couple seconds from the sequence and butting together the moments just before and directly after the fall, he jars us. The quirky style runs throughout the film, leaving out expected reaction shots or skipping the split-second of sanctuary between a barb and its deflating effect on the recipient.

At heart, Rushmore is little more than a Nickelodeon movie for adults, the kind of Home Alone-type film in which characters are constantly playing dirty pranks on one another. What makes Rushmore stand out is a brilliance of detail.

Rarely do the movies present us with characters as offbeat as Max Fischer; never do we see moments as bizarre as watching the high-school stage production of Serpico he puts on for us. It's a shame that we can't spend the limited time we have with this renegade adolescent doing something more constructive.