3 stars

Filled with likable actors and 1980s pop songs, "Adventureland" ambles, entertains and … ends … without ever trying to be more than a tribute to odd jobs, unlikely friends and hanging out.

Filmmaker Greg Mottola ("Superbad") pays homage to his own 1980s youth and also to summer-job comedies like "Meatballs" and "Caddyshack," minus Bill Murray and much of the outrageousness. Oh, there's a running gag in which James (a quietly, thoroughly appealing Jesse Eisenberg) gets sucker-punched in the groin by his childhood friend. But this bit stands out like a sore attempt at broad comedy in a picture otherwise secure in its low-key charms.

When James, a recent college graduate, takes a summer job at the amusement park Adventureland, it might as well be a summer camp or a golf course. It's just a setting to allow for after-work parties where smart, underemployed young people get drunk or stoned and occasionally make out.

Mottola, who directed "Superbad" from a script based on Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's youthful memories, here taps his own, and his aesthetic is gentler and more female-inclusive. Though "Adventureland" is virtually without plot, it is full of empathy, for its wiseacre, college-kid main characters and for the townies working alongside them.

James wants to operate rides, but he's told by the couple running the park ("Saturday Night Live" players Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, alternately sly and deadpan) he's more of a games guy. This adds insult to the calamity of his parents (Wendie Malick and Jack Gilpin) reneging on their promise to pay for a summer trip to Europe. Dad's recently downsized job also means James, a bit of a dilettante up to this point, must work if he wants to pay for grad school.

James is glad to find kindred spirits at Adventureland in Joel (Martin Starr), a pipe-smoking intellectual, Em (Kristen Stewart, from "Twilight") a NYU student home for the summer, and Connelly (Ryan Reynolds), a park maintenance man and musician rumored to have once jammed with Lou Reed.

Reynolds crafts a recognizable human being from the potentially stock character of a big fish in a small midway. Our sympathies, however, lie with the dorkier park employees, especially Joel. Starr is spot-on as a guy who can't help being who he is, even though he knows his bookishness doesn't make him a magnet for the ladies.

But comedies that understand the male-geek mind-set are a dime a dozen. Rarer are those that try to also understand the subjects of male fantasies.

Mottola and actress Margarita Levieva do everything right in presenting Lisa P., a scrumptious ride operator whose presence helps her male admirers get through their pitch-a-dime workdays. Whereas a lesser film would have made the character a tramp, "Adventureland" depicts her, for all her good-time simplicity, as more complex than that. Aware of her effect on men, she's also unwilling to exploit it fully.

Em brings her own complexities as well, and Stewart, in her most interesting performance to date, imparts them ably. Already seeing someone when she meets James, who's still a virgin, she's hesitant to get involved with him.

That Stewart can play wariness doesn't surprise. It seems to be her natural state, as evidenced by her nervous eye shifting in this and every role. But it works here, because Em has a secret. Stewart's reserve renders more power to those moments when she allows strong emotion to shine through.

And to think, the source of Stewart's most convincing display of on-screen passion isn't a beautiful vampire but a skinny, nonthreatening maker of mix tapes. Though Eisenberg would take a bronze to Stewart's gold in the averted-gaze Olympics, he can be direct when it counts.

There's a moment in "Adventureland" when Eisenberg shifts from Michael Cera-esque retiring type to man of action. And he does it via a look combining such ardor, bravery and determination that you cannot help but love his character from that point on.

Call Bee movie critic Carla Meyer, (916) 321-1118.