Thanks to the combination of a clever screenplay by Bert V. Royal and charismatic performance by Emma Stone, Easy A is an engaging, winning entry into what has become tired genre, the teen comedy.
Stone plays Olive Penderghast, the type of high school student who goes largely unnoticed by her peers. Rather than spend a weekend camping out with her friend Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka) and said friends freaky hippie parents, and too embarrassed to admit she spent a whole weekend at home alone, she invents a story about spending the weekend with a non-existent boyfriend and losing her virginity in the process. It seems win-win; she gets some peace and quiet, scores some social cred, and the dude supposedly goes to community college, so who’s to know?
Unfortunately, Marianne (Amanda Bynes), the overbearing leader of the school’s prayer group, overhears the conversation and makes Olive the center of a morality crusade. References to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—to which Easy A it owes about as much as The Lion King does to Hamlet—start to abound, including a couple of shout-outs to the notorious 1995 movie version best know for Demi Moore “taking a lot of baths”.