There must be a written rule somewhere that all film adaptations of YA novels have to start with voiceover with muttered wise musings on life by way of introducing the female protagonist to the audience. Wasn’t it just a couple of months ago that another YA novel adaptation, the surprisingly resonant The Fault In Our Stars, arrived on the big screen (making just over $48 million on its opening weekend) with Shailene Woodley reciting voiceover narration?

Not nearly as competent or emotionally authentic as TFIOS, The September Issue-helmer R. J. Cutler’s If I Stay (adapted from Gayle Forman’s best-selling novel with the same title) kicks off on similar ground, dumping short-cut information on the audience instead of breaking into the story at a graceful pace. We learn (or rather, we are told) quite quickly that Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an aspiring and gifted cellist, a bit of an old soul, and an uncharacteristically responsible and conscientious teenager despite being raised in a pressure-free, loose Portland home by extremely cool, formerly “rocker” parents (Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard). While happily (and obsessively) practicing her cello, hanging out with her best friend Kim (Liana Liberato), and writing off premature romances as distractions standing in the way of her goal of studying cello in Julliard, Mia unknowingly steals the heart of her school’s arguably coolest boy Adam (Jamie Blackley, falling short of his character’s suggested charisma), who is also a musician – albeit of rock descent – and gives in. Then comes the dreaded part of the story (this much, the trailer will tell you): Mia and her entire family get into a car crash. With her worldly body in a coma and her soul stuck on the ground, Mia has to decide whether to….stay or go, knowing things will never be the same again if she comes back.

You really want to care what Mia will choose to do in the end, but If I Stay’s flattened melodrama and lack of any sort of mystery will make sure that you ultimately don’t. So no, this isn’t the teenage version of metaphysical romances like Ghost or Just Like Heaven. Even when you sense (or hope) the film might eventually build up to some sort of emotional timbre, its austere tone lacks depth and a sense of dependability: the dialogue feels stiff and rehearsed, the sentiments are manufactured, and the plot lines are visibly manipulated to get the story from point A to point B. Being the remarkable actress she is (with equally remarkable facial features concurrently packed with innocence, vulnerability and wisdom), Moretz justly tries to coat her otherwise implausible character with an aura of earnestness (what teenager would claim to have a curfew when she’s allowed to hang out with her good-looking boyfriend at a party?), but the dialogue lets her down. The exchanges between Mia and Adam are almost too loftily grown up and don’t mesh well with the seemingly low-stakes conflicts in their respectively successful and promising lives.

If there’s one piece of credit If I Stay deserves, it’s that the second act is considerably more balanced. Once the accident happens and the antagonizing voiceover concludes, If I Stay constructs a more operational pace, chronicling Mia’s last couple of years through different facets of her relationship with her family, her music, and, of course, Adam, via extensive, fervently absorbing flashbacks. Sadly, the good, sincere stuff here -which includes a heart-pounding Julliard audition scene and a friends & family musical jam session- is sandwiched between Mia’s aimless sprints through the hallways of the hospital in which her body is located (for some reason, it takes her a while to accept that no one can see or hear her) and the meatless side characters dropping in and out of the hospital scenes full of questionable logical oversights. (Can Mia open doors herself? Can she touch stuff?)

YA adaptations are often accused of being shallow. While this generalization remains arguably unfair, it’s regrettably the case that If I Stay is made of the stuff the genre’s harshest critics presume it to be. Hence, watching the film accomplish the impossible -turning what could otherwise have been a tear-jerking tragedy into something that deserves nothing more than our mere indifference- is utterly frustrating.

Grade: C-