“I love you awesome nerds,” says one girl to her fellow a cappella singers at the end of the college singing-group comedy “Pitch Perfect,” and who could disagree? Bouncy vocal rearrangements of pop songs, sparkling choreography and a hilarious script make for a movie that’s made to be obsessed over, seen 50 times, quoted as devoutly as such sacred texts as “Heathers” and “Bring It On.”
The movie stars Anna Kendrick as the cool girl who gets roped into the campus nerd herd, and here the thesauri fail: It turns out there is no existing word adequate for her awesomeness. Mega-cute in “Up in the Air” and “50/50,” Kendrick here is snarky and tough without ever coming across as bitchy or entitled — a ballsier update of 1990 Winona Ryder. Recruited by the group’s leaders (Anna Camp and Brittany Snow), who tell her they travel the world to perform in championships, Kendrick’s Beca asks, “On purpose?”
But the opportunity to do “No Diggity” in an empty swimming pool awaits, so Beca joins forces with girls like Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson, also brilliant), who gave herself that name “so twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back,” and a near-mute girl (Hana Mae Lee) who speaks in strange whispers: Listen carefully and you’ll (barely) hear her say things like, “You guys wanna see a dead body?” or “I ate my twin in the womb.”
Meanwhile, the rival boy group, the Treble Makers, takes on vital heckling duties. Their members include a guy crushing on Beca at their dull internship (he’s played by Skylar Astin, who is likable but a bit dull in the way of a WB Network star) and a chubby-faced would-be teen idol called Bumper (Adam DeVine, who also gets big laughs).
Scene after scene detonates like a little joy bomb, the way “Hairspray” did: There are auditions and riff-offs (one group tries to out-improv the other) and bus trips (one of the best scenes features the girls on the road while randomly busting out “Party in the USA”). There is also slightly too much vomit.
The girls say things like, “My fellow a-ca people” and “a ca scuse me?” Someone who is asked if she is being serious says, “Dixie Chicks serious!” In the background during the singing competitions, a pair of announcers (John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks) delivers rude commentary on it all: “This number is like an elephant dart to the public’s face.”
The first produced screenplay by “30 Rock” writer Kay Cannon, who adapted a book by Mickey Rapkin, contains as many quotable lines as “Austin Powers,” and director Jason Moore (also a rookie, though he directed the Broadway sensation “Avenue Q”) keeps a pace so fast you barely have time to wind up the last laugh before another great line comes along. It’s already hard to picture a world when people didn’t go around saying, “Could you please get your head out of your ass? It’s not a hat” or “I’m gonna finish him like a cheesecake.”
I’ll overlook the cheating in the big finale (the girl group is obviously getting help from invisible male singers on the soundtrack to round out the bass lines) and the so-so love scenes. This movie’s so good, its a cappella version of Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” is actually better than the original. But then again, bacterial meningitis is better than the original.