There are smart movies and funny movies on the subject of white kids taking on a black “gangsta” pose as an identity in high school. “The New Guy” is neither. This comedy from one of the writers of “There’s Something About Mary” is just a random sampling of riffs on the idea. Every time it is about to reach a comic or intellectual epiphany, it sputters, wasting another perfectly good moment.

It tallies up to a perfectly wasted 100 minutes.

DJ Qualls, the scrawny, ungainly kid from “Road Trip,” is Dizzy Gillespie Harrison, a James Brown-digging geek whose senior year in high school begins like every year before it. He’s picked on, bullied and humiliated by his peers and the teachers. His counselor (Illeana Douglas) and Dad (edgy country crooner Lyle Lovett) panic and decide to put him on drugs.

Then, a turn of events sends Diz, briefly, to jail. He’s taken under the wing of Luther (Eddie Griffin), a veteran con with a stink-eye stare and a dangerous rep. It’s all a pose, he assures the kid. Luther becomes Machiavelli and hips Diz to what it takes to be street.

“Prison is tough,” he says. “But high school is war.”

Diz starts going by “Gil,” changes wardrobe, changes his walk, gets a tattoo and enrolls in a new school.

Gil’s a dangerous dude and catnip to the ladies, especially cheerleader Danielle (Eliza Dushku). Nobody picks on Gil any more. But his remade image means that he has less time for his nerdy pals: Zooey Deschanel, Jerod Mixon and Parry Shen.

But how did he get here? By violence. He picks a fight and uses the threat of more violence to maintain the cool pose. The movie’s mission is to have Diz give up the violence, learn who his friends are and bring a more tolerant culture to the high school where he reigns as the cool kid.

There’s a funny movie and an aptly timed doctoral dissertation on white-kids-who-act-black in our future. “The New Guy” is just the same old lame high school screen comedy garbage, rehashed for a new generation of suckers.