Chloë Grace Moretz (Doane Gregory/Warner Bros. Pictures)

“You can’t hide forever. I see you already.” High school indie-rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley) tells this to aspiring young cellist Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz) in the teenage tearjerker If I Stay. It’s the only moment in the movie when I got something in my eyes. Adam sees Mia practicing through the door of a closed classroom, like she’s a living Joseph Cornell box and he’s hoping that love will open the door for him and for her. It’s a nice sentiment in a movie whose premise seems ridiculous, but didn’t have to turn out nearly as badly as it does. You may wonder why a critic, given the choice between one-and-only screenings of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and If I Stay would choose the latter, but something in this cheesy tale of young love called to me. Alas, nobody answered.

The movie begins as Mia is waiting to hear from the Juilliard School of Music. The screenplay introduces her friends and family efficiently, if not memorably. Mia is the teenaged daughter of an aging pair of Portland hipsters, her dad’s youth spent playing drums in a band called the Nasty Bruises, that is until he quit the band and sold his drum kit so he could buy Mia her first cello. This young cellist has of course fallen hard for Adam, whose band Willamette Stone (really!) is about to break out of the Portland scene. Then, as Mia narrates, “in a second, everything changes.” On a snowy Portland road, Mia is caught in a terrible car accident that kills both her parents, leaves her younger brother in critical condition and Mia in a coma. Mia is outside her body in a state of limbo. As the trailer would have it, Mia’s conflict turns from whether or not she should move thousands of miles away from her boyfriend to attend Juilliard, to whether or not she should stay alive. The audience’s conflict is whether or not to stay awake.

It’s a cheesy idea, but not an inherently awful one. Moretz is an appealing actress and plays a young woman with, like Moretz, a lot of promise ahead of her. The creative differences between the classical protege and the (supposed) indie rocker would have made a nice platform for the acceptance of seemingly irreconcilable cultural differences. Mia’s 180-degree turn from her parents’ lifestyle is explicitly explained as a search for structure as opposed to chaos, in music as well as in life. Ironically, the film and the music within it are too structured and predictable. The script is terrible, though Stacy Keach as Mia’s grandfather does his best to lend dignity to lines like, “What you did on stage, that was magic!”

The script’s structure doesn’t help, killing characters you never had time to care about and never really fleshing them out in the series of flashbacks that alternate between emergency room shots of the disembodied Mia hovering around her friends and remaining family. If I Stay tries to set up tension between Mia’s classical music and Adam’s rising star as an indie rocker, but what we hear of his music sounds like the kind of completely innocuous banalities that peddle soft drinks. The movie pays lip service to actual rebellious good music, Adam wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt, Mia’s house decorated with Clash album covers, her little brother even singing along to Iggy Pop in the car before the fateful crash (naturally, he’s listening to ‘The Passenger”) But these seem more like home furnishing catalog choices than earned texture. The last straw comes during a climactic campfire singalong to the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today,” a song about suicide that in the movie is performed, like all of the supposed “rock” songs in the film, like another goddamned Coca Cola commercial.

Director R.J. Cutler made the strong fashion documentary The September Issue, but he can’t make anything out of this clumsy fabric. If I Stay could have been a charming Just Like Heaven for the Twilight demographic, but it’s just a 106-minute Hallmark card.

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If I Stay
Directed by R. J. Cutler
Written by Shauna Cross, based on the novel by Gayle Forman
With Chloë Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, Jamie Blackley, Stacey Keach
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and some sexual material
Running time 106 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you