Rated PG-13

“Found footage” movies like this, filmed on cheap equipment with poor editing, improvised dialogue and Swiss cheese plotlines, are becoming a dime a dozen, and for good reason. Usually made for very little money, to the studios they represent very low risk for remarkably high returns. They are corrupting movie-going in exactly the same way reality TV is ruining staying home.

However, there’s every indication that the dudes who made “Chronicle”—first-time director Josh Trank and writer Max “Son of John” Landis—were attempting something truly next-generation. First, they use the device to tell a story that is actually inventive, well put together and centered on universal human experience. And second—well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

This isn’t your standard superhero origin story, though it has all the trimmings. Three average high school archetypes—the popular one, the brainy one, and the weasely wet-noodle misfit—are exposed to some glowy alien thingamabob and later discover it’s left them with the ability to move stuff around with their minds.

Yes, this is very silly, but if you ride it out, the journey is remarkably well developed. Their baby steps into understanding their new powers are exactly that—infantile. They begin by chucking tennis balls at each other. Then they start stacking Legos. Then they feed themselves some chips. The stages the trio goes through, with the exception of the fact that they don’t use their hands, provide a fabulous parallel to normal human development.

The problem, as anyone who’s ever been a teenager can tell you, is that normal human development can suck. Remember the first time you successfully parallel parked your mom’s car? Fun, right? Empowering. How about the first time you crashed that car? Was anyone hurt? Not so fun. Danger, it turns out, shares a direct relationship with expanding ability. To grow up is simply to walk through thresholds of mounting consequence, and to gauge one’s own ability to cope while it’s happening.

They don’t call them growing pains for nothing. And, as the story goes, it’s not only those doing the growing that can get hurt. Superhuman telekinetic capacities notwithstanding, “Chronicle” is soundly anchored in the kinds of emotional trials we’ve all been through, and the film does a bang-up job of describing both the exhilaration and confusion of adolescent self-discovery.

So it comes as some distraction that a story so well conceived and performed (leads Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell and Michael B. Jordan do great, grounding work) is confined to the limits of a crappy $500 camera from Best Buy. And here’s where we get to that second point.

Beyond repeated assertions from the folks on camera that they “just have to film” everything, there’s a series of conspicuously odd hollow spots that run through the story. One girl tapes everything “for her blog,” but we never see the blog. One of the boys is constantly poking status updates into his phone, but whatever he’s posting is never shown. In the final minutes of the film (which, by the way, takes a hard left into full-blown Akira-ville), the clips are suddenly sourced from police units, security cams and phones of random residents as their walls crash down around them. Though it’s all fairly epic, one has to wonder exactly why it goes so gloriously off the rails at the very last moment.

Here’s a theory: Trank and Landis, children of the electronic age that they are, were not attempting to make a movie. They were attempting a new kind of third dimensional genre entertainment that would build online into a viral TOSH.0 crescendo. It’s been done to varying degrees for years, from the seminal murder mystery that confounded millions in the lead-up to Stephen Spielberg’s “A.I.” to Warner Brothers “Why So Serious” campaign that recruited mischievous clowns across the globe to follow elaborate scavenger hunts in the name of the nemesis of “The Dark Knight.”

If the whole story of “Chronicle” had played out in the wild Web instead of in a tired old theater, with full support from a brave studio that could easily buy some heavy traction in YouTube snippets and tweets and blog entries and phone messages and Facebook posts between the characters, it could very well have become a “War of the Worlds” moment for the modern age.

But that might not have been terribly cheap. Big studios infamously chase nothing but the bottom line, and there’s simply not yet a viable model of such a thing that could promise any quantifiable return on the investment. All they know is that “Paranormal Activity” cost next to nothing and keeps raking in money. And that is probably why “Chronicle” got wedged right back in the only box they know how to mail.

The good news is, hobbled as they were, Trank and Landis still deliver an excitingly fresh and honest take on some classic themes with truly believable characters. In more ways than one, their movie proves that although new experiences can be scary, it’s worth coping with it and growing the hell up (are you listening, 20th Century Fox?).