Despite the Omaha high-school setting, this isn't really a high-school movie. Broderick is as gosh-darn likable as ever in the role of teacher Jim McAllister, but his character has a pathetic edge that's first revealed in his yen for cheesy sex movies in which jocks get it on with cheerleaders. The rest of the film is perfectly fearless when it comes to student-faculty relationships -- an early scene in which one of Broderick's colleagues seduces (or is seduced by?) unctuously erotic teenager Tracy Flick (Witherspoon) with his infant's crib clearly visible in the background struck me as almost as sick, in its way, as the stuff in Happiness.

Witherspoon plays her role with honey dripping from her lips and a fiery determination simmering away behind a perky, pretty facade. Jim finds her intense but blank single-mindedness both dangerous and distasteful and is determined to sabotage her plan to run for student body president, unopposed. At the same time, he finds himself -- to his own horror -- sexually attracted to the girl, who promises that once she becomes president, the two of them will be spending lots of quality time together. And as Jim deals with Tracy, his personal life comes undone.

Unfortunately, the tangential story threads involving Jim eventually hijack the movie, which is actually better when it's concentrating on the kids who make up its supporting cast. There's Chris Klein as Paul Metzler, the goofy, well-meaning jock whom Broderick cajoles into challenging Tracy in the campaign. Also compelling is the plight of his younger sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), a fed-up young lesbian who starts her own campaign for personal reasons and gets many of the most incisive lines. "Don't vote for me," she tells the student body at an all-school assembly, to wild applause. "Who cares? Don't vote at all."

Probably the best film ever financed in part by MTV, Election only disappoints in its lack of focus. Jim is the ostensible protagonist, but his thought processes aren't clearly defined, which makes him somewhat of a cipher -- a hypocrite for hypocrisy's sake and a big dummy, to boot. Tracey is a bit more interesting, but her character is no deeper than the reassuring motivational slogans hanging on the posters in her bedroom, which makes it hard to peg the movie completely on her. The unassuming Paul and the cynical Tammy are refreshing supporting players, but this isn't their story.

In an odd little coda, Payne and Taylor have a little more fun at the expense of Jim and Tracy, with a sequence that both mocks what Jim has made of his life and seems to bear out his dismay at the idea of someone like Tracy eventually inhabiting a position of real power. That the film both sympathizes with and indicts Jim's debilitating madness is emblematic of the depth and finesse with which it deploys its satire. That Payne and Taylor used an American high school as the backdrop for a comedy about the fundamental absurdity of the democratic political process shows that they remember what it was like to be a daily inhabitant of such an institution and, wisely, they haven't discarded the lessons learned there.