Review: YA romance 'Chemical Hearts' channels raw emotion about first love, grief and guilt

For a young-adult romance, “Chemical Hearts” packs a lot of raw, genuine emotion as it delves into young love, first love, and the pain that comes with it.

Henry Page (played by Austin Abrams) has reached the pinnacle for a teen writer: Editor of his high school newspaper in his senior year. His problem, he says in the movie’s narration, is that he’s a great writer but hasn’t lived enough in his life to have something interesting to write about.

A new transfer student, Grace Town (played by “Riverdale” star Lili Reinhart), changes that in a hurry. Henry’s journalism teacher selects Grace to co-edit the paper with Henry, though she demurs and offers to be assistant editor — though she refuses to write anything herself. The only other information Henry gleans from Grace at first is that she walks with a cane, she has a car that she lets Henry drive, and that she refuses to drive it herself.

Through a combination of befriending Grace and stalking her, Henry sees more of the picture. Grace’s leg was severely injured in a car crash nine months previous — a crash that killed Grace’s first boyfriend, Dom, her old school’s star quarterback. But there’s still a big chunk of the story that Grace is leaving out, even as she and Henry fall in love.

Writer-director Richard Tanne — following up his 2016 romance “Southside With You,” which depicted Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson’s first date — adapts Krystal Sutherland’s YA novel “Our Chemical Hearts” with a respect for the genre and its teen audience that’s often lacking. Tanne knows that love in the teen years is particularly intense, because the participants have not yet developed the perspective with which to measure it. That’s true here for Henry, who sees Grace as a mystery waiting to be solved, and for Grace, wrestling with her feelings for Henry and whether she’s betraying her deceased first love.

Besides Tanne’s sensitive handling of the material, the emotional punch of “Chemical Hearts” comes from its young leads. Abrams (“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”) gives Henry a soulful puppy-dog demeanor with flashes of self-effacing wit, while Reinhart channels the grief and guilt of a young woman trying to move forward in her life without completely forgetting her past. Together, they throw off some considerable sparks, making “Chemical Hearts” a combustible mix.

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‘Chemical Hearts’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, August 21, streaming on Amazon Primel. Rated R for language, sexuality and teen drug use. Running time: 93 minutes.