‘Now and Then’ (PG-13)

"Now and Then," the story of four girls coming of age in the summer of 1970, drags like a bad summer vacation—it floats hazily, ends suddenly and leaves you feeling crabby: How can it be over? Nothing happened.

Director Lesli Linka Glatter, in her feature film debut, hopscotches through time to solve the movie's supposed mystery: How did four best friends turn into the women they are today? Glatter sets out to evoke the world of 12-year-olds fumbling with visions of adulthood. Instead, we see the work of adults fumbling with visions of adolescence.

Sure, the girls squeal a bunch and careen around on their bikes. But what real-life preteens never squabble with each other? How come they never tell their mothers they hate them and wish they were dead? The plot includes divorce and an unsolved murder. And yet the emotions are so flat, it's as if someone left the cap off and let out all the hormonal fizz.

It isn't an awful movie. It's a kill-time movie, the kind you might watch on a flight to Papua New Guinea. As long as the headsets were free.

The first sign of trouble comes early as the film's throaty narrator, Samantha (Demi Moore), drives into her home town of Shelby, Ind., and confides: "Thomas Wolfe once said you can't go home again. But he wasn't a chick who made a pact with his friends when he was 12." Samantha wears black and has zombie eyes and twitchy smoker's fingers, which is to say, of course, that she is a successful writer.

The other women are depicted with all the subtlety of Halloween costumes from K mart. There's Roberta (Rosie O'Donnell), a career-gal doctor; Chrissy (Rita Wilson), a prudish, pink-pinafored housewife; and Teeny (Melanie Griffith), a busty television star whose face, for some reason, looks as though it had been left damp in the dryer overnight. The four friends are reunited for the birth of Chrissy's first child.

Mercifully, the movie is mostly "then," with very little "now." And there are some worthwhile moments in the flashback scenes. Samantha's little sister crawls into bed with her as their parents argue menacingly beyond the bedroom door. And Chrissy's mother (Bonnie Hunt) gives her a hilariously prissy sex lesson: "This is a flower, right. All women have a garden, and women need a big hose to water it with." Cloris Leachman delivers in a cameo as Samantha's bingo-crazed grandmother, carpet-sweeping the crumbs even as Samantha nibbles a cookie.

The young actresses Christina Ricci (Roberta), Thora Birch (Teeny), Gaby Hoffmann (Samantha) and Ashleigh Aston Moore (Chrissy) do their best with a trite script.

Their antics are cute, although they never rise above cute, which is why the movie fails as "an endearing `Stand by Me' for girls," as the hype promises.

One day at lunch, Teeny tells her chums that she has stuffed her bra with pudding-filled balloons. Teeny says: "Pudding has a heavier, more realistic texture."

"What flavor is it?" her friend asks.

"Vanilla," she says. And so is the film.