While the 16-year-old Jodi is smart, kind and pretty and comes from a loving, well-off family, she is endlessly mocked by her classmates and miserable for it. The reason, in case the title “Tall Girl” left any room for ambiguity, is that Jodi is 6-foot-1. Apparently, Ruby Bridges High School does not have a basketball team, and nobody there has ever seen a teenage girl with a growth spurt.

It is undeniably tough to be ostracized, especially because kids zero in on difference with unerring meanness. But Jodi’s fate ranks relatively low on the hardship meter.

Our heroine, portrayed by the appealingly earnest newcomer Ava Michelle , tries to slink around unnoticed and mostly hangs out with her best friend, Fareeda ( Anjelika Washington ), and the smitten Jack (Griffin Gluck). The uneasy status quo shifts when Jodi starts swooning over Stig ( Luke Eisner ), a Swedish exchange student.

In a show of striking imagination, Fareeda and Jack are a free-spirited black girl and a nerdy white boy. Stig, meanwhile, is impervious to American social dictates — or is he? The one exception to the film’s otherwise prefab cast of characters is Jodi’s older sister, Harper ( Sabrina Carpenter ), who is a beauty queen but nice.