Adam Brody and Meg Ryan

If Adam Brody had been around 20 years ago, I would have done a lot better with girls. Here's a guy doing the same nerdy, sarcastic, obscure-reference-laced Jewy thing, only instead of it just impressing friends' moms, as mine did, it puts him in PEOPLE magazine's Sexiest Man Alive issue and makes him the first boy ever on the cover of Elle Girl. What James Dean did for inarticulate antisocial depressives, Brody has done for dorks.

And now, at 27, after playing a teenager for four years, Brody plays the leading-man version of that guy in the $10 million picture In the Land of Women, which opens April 20. As a pouty, heartsick soft-porn screenwriter who moves to Michigan to take care of his grandmother, Brody winds up making out with both the hot mom across the street (Meg Ryan) and her teenage daughter (Kristen Stewart). And somehow he does something that creepy while still seeming like a really nice guy. The same innocent charm made him an US magazine fixture as The O.C's breakout star: the sarcastic but decent one. "Adam is the funniest guy you still want to see get the girl," says O.C. creator Josh Schwartz, 30, who patterned Brody's character after himself. "He's able to attract neurotic Jewish writers to write for him, but he's definitely cooler in real life than the characters he's provided. He can be really sweet and adorkable, but there's some anger there. He was able to give the character some dignity. Seth Cohen was a guy who had no friends, but it was almost as much his choice as the Newport Beach water-polo players'." In other words, he's the first nerd to tell the cool kids that giving noogies is lame.

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