One of the more revealing and amusing moments in "Raise Your Voice" comes in the opening credits when we learn that one of the producers is a new company called ChickFlicks.

Movies about the troubles and foibles of teenage girls have always been with us, going back to the days of Hayley Mills and beyond, but, in recent years, the genre of teenage chick flicks has grown so vast it could probably support several production companies.

Most of these movies fall into the subgenre of 21st-century Cinderella stories, and the resolutely cheery, lightweight, sentimental "Raise Your Voice" is no exception. Hilary Duff stars as Terri Fletcher, a talented Arizona high school girl whose dream is to study at a prestigious performing-arts school in Los Angeles. Her arty aunt (Rebecca De Mornay) encourages her to apply, but her strict and overly protective father insists she stay home and wait tables at the family diner.

The father is played by David Keith with such menace that he always seems on the verge of belting his daughter in the mouth, which makes it understandable that Terri would want to head for the Coast. But it gives the mostly fluffy movie an unsettlingly ugly edge that I don't think was what director Sean McNamara had in mind. It almost seems that somebody needs to protect Terri from her father, and her mother (Rita Wilson) doesn't seem up to the task.

In any event, the movie picks up when Terri, who barely knows how to fake the passion of a mediocre pop ballad, gets to LA and finds herself woefully unprepared for a school where the other students give fluent readings of Bach and Rachmaninoff. Some of the music played at the school is really quite extraordinary, and a couple of supporting performers - Kat Dennings and Johnny K. Lewis - steal the movie as passionately talented nerds.

Not only does Terri not belong in this company, neither does Duff, who is cute as a button but modestly talented as a singer. In order to give her a triumphant moment at the conclusion of the movie, her voice is so thickly coated in reverb and so deeply drowned in violins that you can barely tell that an actual person is actually singing.

Otherwise, after some unsettling moments early on, the movie spins around in a formulaic groove, presenting us with the requisite mean girls and lovable geeks, plus the usual spike-haired heartthrob (British actor Oliver James, who played a similar role opposite Amanda Bynes in "What a Girl Wants.") You can see the ending coming from about an hour away.