The fact that gyrating belly-barer Britney Spears stars as Lucy, a demure, premed-bound class valedictorian, is but one layer in the onion of implausibility that is Crossroads. Our Brit's also a cardigan-clad daddy's girl who says ''Y'all,'' who's as comfortable in her pop's auto-repair shop as in a seedy New Orleans karaoke bar. But if you can suspend -- make that hang on a meat hook -- every last morsel of disbelief, you'll have a gay old time watching sweet Lucy, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Mimi (Taryn Manning), and prima donna Kit (Zoë Saldana) embark on a cross-country road trip of self-discovery. Driving them is hunky, mysterious Ben (Anson Mount), who, the token male in a pink-and-yellow gynocracy of lip gloss and giggles, proves his healthy testosterone count with one-liners like ''No one drives the cruiser but me!'' (He's referring, of course, to his yellow 1973 Buick Skylark.)
Unlike Mariah Carey's superbly sloppy ''Glitter,'' ''Crossroads'' holds together as a blissfully innocuous teen dream, complete with a rockin' first sexual experience for little Lucy. When the movie attempts to deal with the more serious issues facing those who aren't girls, not yet women (namely, teen pregnancy), it teeters into glibness. But hey, you still get to see Britney pole-dance.
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