High school sucks. While this is currently a headlines-worthy observation, movies about high school have been underscoring it for years. From The Blackboard Jungle, Carrie, Jawbreaker and Heathers, to Cooley High, Scream, The Ice Storm and Never Been Kissed, the point is the same: In high school, you spend way too much time worrying about cliques, grades, popularity and sex. Even when you resist, you're responding to the rule. While no one would or could take credit for the ingenious oppressiveness of high school, it's clear that its rituals of abuse and anxiety go way back. You'd think someone in charge would try to change things, remembering early days of torture. But no. The high school persists, defined by its many small distresses and torments, its awesome unfairness and ugliness.

Alexander Payne's Election makes this pattern fiercely clear. It also delineates the investments that adults have in it, showing by way of wickedly good comedy how high school is not an end to anything, not a phase to be endured or forgotten, but a training ground for adulthood. What's most unnerving and rewarding about the film is its dead-on mirroring of adult and teenage machinations. It pits aspiring senior class president Tracy Flick (the resplendent Reese Witherspoon) against civics teacher and student-government faculty advisor Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick, in his most perfectly realized performance since Ferris Bueller), both equally determined to win their frantically escalating battle of wills and wits.

At first, Tracy seems the ideal high school student. Resourceful, pretty and relentless, she's an overachieving darling in front of authorities (or rather, those who imagine themselves to be so). A big fish in the small pond of her Omaha high school, Tracy works too hard at everything. She makes her own campaign buttons, posters and "Pick Flick" cupcakes, focusing her supercharged energies on winning. Initially, the irony is that she can't help but win, as she's running unopposed. Who would run against her? She's the girl everyone admires and despises, the model student and scary Heather (without a posse, because who could hang with her? she's far too self-involved), the delectable Lolita and the don't-fuck-with-me chick whose divorced, hard-working and well-connected mother (Colleen Camp) has raised her to think the world owes her.

Like Payne's first film (that brilliant breakdown of abortion politics, Citizen Ruth), Election offers multiple perspectives, less interested in clear distinctions between right and wrong than in challenging the idea that such distinctions exist, unchanging and absolute. The script, by Payne and Jim Taylor, achieves this equanimity by giving several characters voiceovers. We're introduced to Tracy by Jim McAllister, whose narration includes dry observation and a freeze frame or two of her face twisted in mid-smirk, to underscore his particular distaste for her. He explains his reaction by telling us, with some warped zeal, that she once had an affair with a colleague (Mark Harelik), who was subsequently forced to leave his wife, children and town. Now, he believes, Tracy must learn the important lesson that she can't always win. And he believes he must be her teacher.

And so, McAllister contrives to run another student against Tracy, the enormously popular and clueless quarterback Paul Metzler (Chris Klein). Events snowball, and soon Paul's sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), angry that her brother has apparently stolen her girlfriend, decides to run in the election as well (that the film makes no big deal of this incipient lesbian relationship is to its credit). When it comes time to make speeches in the gym, the three candidates square off: Tracy fastidiously lists her goals and achievements; Paul, in a full leg cast following a football accident, plays on his classmates' sympathy; but Tammy brings down the house when she asks, microphone feedbacking, "Who cares about this stupid election?" When she promises that, if elected, she will abolish the whole business forever, the appreciative stomping and hooting are deafening. The camera shows her standing awkwardly at the mike while the adults seated behind her shudder visibly: This is democracy run amok.

This is also Election's finest insight, that high school—as an idea if not in every act and instance—is designed and regulated by conventional, well-intentioned adults who fear change and who can't afford to see that their antiquated customs—like school elections—have precious little to do with their students' experiences. Order, familiarity and repetition take precedence over desire and inspiration. Ironically, in this context, Tracy is the ideal and the least likely high school student. For all Jim's antipathy toward her, she's the only high schooler in sight who actually wants to play by the grown-ups' rules, to win the same accolades and reaffirm the same values to which her elders at least pay lip service.

Jim's values and sense of self undergo profound alterations as a result of his difficulties with Tracy. Wanting so badly to order and control his world (as evidenced by his efforts to defeat Tracy with his own candidate), he's left to confront chaos. While the film shows Tracy's moral transgressions (mostly from Jim's perspective), she doesn't quite pay for them as she would in a more regular narrative. Instead, she only seems a bit creepy, in a hyper-clean-and-neat, Donna-Reedish kind of way: she's the throwback that most high schools seem to want to produce. In the end, it's not her fault that she's annoying or aggressive. Rather, Tracy's the consummate high school superstar, destined to go on to a career in national politics. She's the model citizen, having learned well that winning is the most important thing.

Jim must relearn this crucial lesson, as he slowly and hilariously comes undone in the face of Tracy's ruthless pursuit of success. With more to lose and less imagination than the tireless Tracy, Jim is finally unable to control events, despite his enormous sense of dedication or increasing sense of desperation. In high school, Election reminds you, the system wins.

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