Many years ago, I accompanied an alcoholic friend to an AA meeting. Having never experienced one prior, I was absorbed by the support-group confessional and group-think dynamics that encourage participants to open up, bare their souls and renew their commitments to a clean life.

As interesting as it all was, I realized quickly that I was just a passing voyeur at their party. I would not know their pain. I could only peer over the edge to see the depths where they had hit bottom. Detached from their experience, I was outside the wall of sadness, anger and joy they shared.

I felt the same way in a noble-intentioned new film named Manic, the story of troubled teens in the youth wing of a psychiatric hospital. The film has many group therapy scenes and some pretty good moments of despair and rage. The performances are admirable. The writing has integrity. The acting bears the tics and raw edges of performers unafraid to fly without a net. But it left me unengaged. When we first meet seventeen-year-old Lyle (a striking Joseph Gordon-Levitt), he's just pulverized the skull of a taunting teammate with a baseball bat. Against his will, he finds himself admitted to a juvenile mental institution where he joins a collection of troubled adolescents, which plays like a modern teen take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The group includes: reformed addict, psychiatrist and counselor David (Don Cheadle); sullen and remote Tracy (Zooey Deschanel); abused, withdrawn Kenny (Cody Lightning); rapid-wit but deeply troubled Chad (co-writer Michael Bacall); angry-as-hell hip-hop white boy Mike (Eldon Henson); and tough-talking Goth chick Sara (Sarah Rivas).

The film charts Lyle's entry and immersion into this world as he tries to sort of his problems of anger while integrating into this community or "family," and his developing relationships with Tracy, Kenny and Chad. And what Manic does well is paint a picture of the violence and aggression these teens experience as a normal part of their daily life. It also provocatively describes how thin the separation can be between what's considered "sane" and otherwise.

To the film's credit, there are no easy answers and no solutions close at hand, and we watch Lyle and company navigate their way through a complex maze of unbridled anger and often times defeat.

But the problem with Manic, which doesn't want for lack of earnestness or integrity, is that it never really manages to make these kids' pain universal, as valiantly as the actors try. We get no real sense of the arcs of their lives, who they might have been before and who they long to be later. The here and now is the essence, the film tells us, and with their current emotional states as fragile as they are, it doesn't make for well-rounded characters or good drama. The result is that we watch the numerous confessionals with a numbed distance.

The film's biggest misstep - and it's a big one - is a hugely misguided technical approach. The entire film takes place inside an overheated, overshot vacuum, and the now-tired conceit of using a handheld, focus-fishing, overly jerky digital camera to convey "intimacy" is shopworn. The deliberately over and underexposed images, while intending to convey a particular and garish tone, are ugly.

Director Jordan Melamud has explained that this unsettling approach to crafting Manic's look sprang from his desire to represent the troubled youth's emotional state in a messy, unfocused way in the first part of the film. The strategy would then be to set up a logical technical pattern, and as the characters themselves stabilize, the camera would progressively follow suit.

This proves to be an overly didactic, literal and "manic" way of shooting, and it ends up taking us out of the picture, distancing us from the built-in drama of the situation, forcing us to realize we're in the grips of yet another low-budget "indie" collapsing under the weight of its plodding artistic aspirations.

The performances are gritty, beginning with Gordon-Levitt, a young actor reared on television's 3rd Rock from the Sun, departing with fierce grace from his comic background. He's been around for awhile in some lower-profile film roles (including the voice of Jim Hawkins in Disney's ill-fated Treasure Planet), but here he emerges as a James Dean-esque, volatile combination of pent-up rage and quiet intensity. He knows the value of silence in a way most young actors do not, and his late scenes with Deschanel and Lightning carry across some sad emotional truth, the kind which are only seen with the eyes and don't come from the printed page.

Don Cheadle, that great, dependable and unsung artist who always contributes something interesting and human, is a recovered drug addict who serves as the lone authority figure in the group, the counselor and confidante, the facilitator and friend. Cheadle is a wonderful performer, and if there's any question in the matter, one need only refer to his poignant Boogie Nights moment where his porn star goes legit and is turned down for a bank loan and a brighter future, his initial disbelief turned to defeat. He's always got something rich on his mind, and it's almost never about the dialogue he's been given. He performs on a high order in Manic, but the film drags behind him at every turn.

In one excellent scene, he delivers an atypical emotional outburst that stuns everyone, audience included. It's a terrifying moment where control is lost; a rock fissures and cracks. And Manic has its share of those scenes. Every once in awhile, one comes along and almost convinces you that you're seeing a richer film.

But overall, the film is a largely unsuccessful mixed bag, with some good performances in roles that don't add up to much. What Manic is trying to do is commendable. It just doesn't quite pull it off.

As it stands, the film is a missed opportunity. Its heart is in the right place and it contains some truth. But it's also underdeveloped and sunk by the damned faux-artiness of a camera desperate for its tripod.