You know how, when you go see a Shakespeare play, you spend the first five or ten minutes just trying to figure out what everyone's saying; then your brain clicks into Elizabethan mode and the dialogue becomes clear as daylight? Same thing happens with "Juno."
Fifteen year old Juno speaks in the deeply idiomatic parlance of adolescence, a language so particular to time and place that it's nearly a foreign tongue to everyone not of it. Once we attune to that parlance, however, we find her dealing with some of the most serious issues a young person can face with a healthy mixture of style, brains, and staggering immaturity. In other words, she's a reasonably together teenager, one I'd be happy to call my daughter.
Yes, this is a "teenage pregnancy" movie, but it's a sharp teenage pregnancy movie, one willing to style the teenager in question as (within the range of a 15-yr-old) mistress of her own destiny. Further, it's willing to play with our conceptions of its characters, finding sympathy in some unexpected places and blinding selfishness in others, and charting those journeys in unique and interesting ways.
Screenwriter Diablo Cody is being heralded as the next big thing. I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that she's written a sharp, funny, good movie with "Juno." After five or ten minutes, I could even figure out what everyone was saying.
