Back in the days before digital photography, it was not at all unusual for professional photographers to shoot half a dozen rolls of film with the implicit understanding that only one or two images would survive the cut and be worth the effort.

Likewise, every once in a great while, a high school comedy comes along that absolutely reminds us why we suffer through so many obtuse, insipid cinematic interpretations of adolescent development. “Clueless” did it. “Election” did it. “Mean Girls” did it. “Juno” did it. And now “Easy A” has done it.

Like “Clueless,” which mined Jane Austen’s “Emma” for material, “Easy A” is a play off of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter,” about a woman who is publicly shamed into wearing a mark to denote her sexual transgressions.

However, while Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is forced to submit to the hypocritical whims of a colonial patriarchy, Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) not only stokes the fire of her humiliation, she started the conflagration in the first place.

Olive is about as smart and clean cut a high school student as you are bound to find. She’s never even had sex. But when a little white lie about her bedroom exploits gets out, something amazing occurs — for the first time in her life, people at school know who she is. And her newfound bad-girl reputation only increases the more people she’s supposedly had sex with.

Deciding to use the vicious high school rumor mill to her advantage (and to aid a cadre of less-than-popular boys), Olive decides to advance her place in the social hierarchy by labeling herself the easiest lay in school.

You’d think a girl as smart as Olive would know this cannot possibly end well. Of course, the little white lie that started it all eventually spins out of her control, ultimately threatening to ruin her life and the lives of those closest to her.

Paying more than a little homage to the Brat Pack

John Hughes comedies of the 1980s, “Easy A” is a comedy of morals and manners, borrowing the veneer of vulgarity to examine one of humanity’s oldest moralizing preoccupations.

Technically, Olive never sleeps with anyone, therefore she can hardly be faulted for a moral lapse. But while she did not intentionally start the rumors that transform her from an invisible entity into the most infamous girl at school, she certainly uses them to her advantage, going so far as to exchange money for the gossip of sexual conquest.

Is this prostitution? Wisely, “Easy A” lets the viewer decide.

Emma Stone delivers one of the best female performances of the year, a sublime act of such incandescent comic genius as to very likely foreshadow a career among Hollywood’s greatest comediennes. The hilarious, rapid-fire, laugh-a-minute script is built around the sassy, husky-voiced redhead in a way few films are; though the narrative and screenplay are good enough to stand on their own, one cannot imagine anyone but the superbly sardonic Stone in the role.

The supporting actors are largely terrific, too, particularly the genius casting of Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s madcap parents. Amanda Bynes stops by as the school’s hypocritical Super Christian, a role cribbed half from “Mean Girls” and half from Mandy Moore in the glorious “Saved.” The film takes a lot of cheap shots at low-hanging religious fruit — some deserved, some not — an almost compulsory element, given the film’s source material.

“Easy A” is proof that great stories are malleable enough to fit any age. Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have predicted a world of cellular phones and webcasts, but he’d recognize that the human condition has changed little since he first set pen to paper to write a story of puritanical authority run amok. “Easy A,” one of the wittiest, most provocative, smartest high school comedies in years, addresses the age-old question of socially acceptable behavior with unrepentant chutzpah and rare comic insight.

EASY A

Cast: Emma Stone, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Amanda Bynes, Dan Bryd, Penn Badgley, Lisa Kudrow, Thomas Hayden Church, Alyson Michalka

Director: Will Gluck

Theaters: Hollywood, Cinemark, Tinseltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills

Rated: PG-13 (for mature thematic elements involving teen sexuality, language and some drug material)

Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Grade: A-

Photo by 2010 Adam Taylor / Sony Pictures