“Mean Girls,” the musical, the movie, works fairly well. I know, I know. Curb your enthusiasm there, bub. But that’s how it is. Like “The Color Purple,” another movie musical now in theaters, the movie’s performers elevate largely forgettable songs working hard to convince the source material it’d make a terrific song-and-dance vehicle. In the case of “Mean Girls,” diehard admirers of the clique-bait source material, a generation old now, will get their fairly good time.

Tina Fey’s 2004 screenplay started from a 2002 nonfiction book, “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boys, and the New Realities of Girl World.” The first film offered a quippy, cleverly two-faced demonization/embrace of toxic female teardown behavior.

The story concerns how home-schooled Cady Heron, the new kid at a Chicago-area high school, became a pet makeover project of the Plastics. This trio of “apex predators” are led by fearsome, manipulating, deeply insecure Regina George.

“Mean Girls” became a 2018 Broadway musical, nominated for 12 Tonys. “Mean Girls” the musical spawned lots of touring editions and may well end up being revived on high school stages long after “Anything Goes” or “The Music Man” have been deemed unrevivable. Now in 2024, “Mean Girls” the musical is “Mean Girls” the movie musical.

So much has changed in two decades. While the basic sociological dynamics of “Mean Girls” remain in place (Fey adapted her Broadway libretto for the movie), the escalating war of humiliation between Cady and Regina, along with collateral damage and various power ballads, is captured by the characters’ cellphone cameras, TikTok videos and the cold glare of social media.

But the mean-girl fun of “Mean Girls” feels different today — curdled, somehow. Too many of us know stories of high school bullying taken too lightly with tragic results. The new movie can’t forsake its entire comic personality to accommodate that much of the real new world. That said: Regina’s destroy-all-enemies anthem “World Burn,” sung in the movie by Reneé Rapp, feels like a dramatic misjudgment.

Like much of the work here by first-time feature directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., the visual fabulizing (full of crimson, apocalyptic rage and high notes) has a way of falsifying rather than intensifying the emotion.

In the new film, Angourie Rice (“Mare of Easttown”) plays Cady; the auxiliary Plastics are portrayed by Avantika Vandanapu and Bebe Wood. These characters have traveled from wittily subtle caricatures in the 2004 version to a much broader exaggeration. And while Rapp conveys a fuller range of nastiness than Rachel McAdams was asked to deliver in 2004, “Mean Girls,” as a stage property and a film version thereof, makes the common musical-theater mistake of overexploiting its antagonist.

There are a lot of solid laughs in “Mean Girls,” still. I wish more of the teen characters in this incarnation worked, on the page and in the performances, with the subtle comic authority of what folks like Fey do so effortlessly. There will always be an audience for high school trauma comedies, with or without power ballads; the 2004 “Mean Girls” picked up the baton passed by John Hughes for a new generation. The 2024 “Mean Girls” is full of material that doesn’t naturally sing, with all the ego-destroying tricks the characters play on one another now all over TikTok, stoking the hurt and the venom.

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sexual material, strong language and teen drinking)

Running time: 1:52

How to watch: In theaters