I have a confession to make: nobody ever made me read “The Catcher In The Rye,” and I never had the drive to get through it on my own. Teen angst has always made me nauseous. Pile on creepy superpowers and the found footage format on top of it, however, and millions Americans like me can’t resist the mystery. I knew from the first trailer for the stupidly named “Chronicle” that I’d see it, and that it’d probably turn out to be a hokey 90210 melodrama. Against all odds, however, “Chronicle” is a teen movie that you can watch with self-respect and the best offering yet of the stale New Year’s season.

Plugging into familiar media-identity themes, writer Max Landis and director Josh Trank update teen-angst standards with recent found-footage conventions—now our nation’s youth narcissistically rolls the cameras as they cry themselves to sleep (I don’t know anyone who actually does this, but maybe this’ll convince people who take hundreds of pictures at parties that they need to slow down). Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is one such beast, an antisocial, documentation-obsessed loser with an abusive alcoholic father. After some setup, Andrew and friends Steve (Michael B. Jordan) and Matt (Alex Russell) discover a crystally-looking thing that gives them telekenetic powers. It leads to some fun stunts at first, but it’s only a matter of time before Andrew starts to use it to vent his pent-up anger and serious bro-drama ensues.

Found footage is often written off as a gimmick for cheap horror movies, but “Chronicle” is one of the few entries in the format with some fresh ideas. As the characters’ abilities become stronger and more refined, they are able to swing the cameras through the air with their minds, cinematically panning over themselves as they goof around. There’s enough juice in these innovations for at least one movie, and they’re enough to forgive the genre’s necessary contrivances. Andrew’s overdocumentation is illogical, and some characters exist solely to hold the camera, but we don’t care.

What anchors “Chronicle,” at least up to a point, are the main trio’s naturalistic performances. Their self-conscious Deep Thoughts and crossfaded non-sequiturs stand as some of the best filmic representations of teenage behavior I can think of; it feels like you’re watching the “failure to talk to girls” and “social pariah becomes life of the party” scenes for the first time. This grounds most of the film in engaging high school malaise.

Chronicle’s biggest problems come in towards the end, where the fallout of a massive twist is brushed over and we are expected to take Matt’s intellectual pretenses and maturity into heroism seriously. I don’t think the filmmakers understood just how annoying an alpha bro who quotes Plato, Hume, and Schopenhauer to impress everybody would come off. The extended final rumble through Seattle is visceral and coherent, and Dane DeHaan’s bug-eyed menace remains a fine anchor even when he’s yelling things like, “I am the apex predator!” but the emotional stakes by that point are slim.

“Chronicle”’s accurate and engaging portrayal of teenage insecurities makes the viewer embarrassed for all the Twilighty garbage that constitutes your average youth-centered blockbuster. It slips a little in trying to be a franchise spark in addition to an adolescent tragedy, but despite its flaws it’s a top-tier teen movie that gives hope for found footage’s future.