Hilary Duff, center, creates an imaginary secret admirer for her mom, Heather Locklear, left, in the comedy "The Perfect Man." Aria Wallace, right, plays Hilary's younger sister. Click photo for larger image. "The Perfect Man" Rating: PG for mildly suggestive content Starring: Hilary Duff, Heather Locklear Director: Mark Rosman "The Perfect Man" Web site Family Film Guide review of "The Perfect Man" A Post-Gazette review from a family perspective. "The Perfect Man" Rated: PG. Suitable for: Tweens, teens and up. What you should know: This romantic comedy stars Hilary Duff as a teen who invents a secret admirer for her mother (Heather Locklear) and finds herself involved in an increasingly elaborate ruse. Language: Nothing objectionable. Sexual situations/nudity: Couples briefly kiss, a bride-to-be opens sexy lingerie at a shower, and a gay bartender (Carson Kressley from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy") flirts with male customers. Violence/scary situations: A man takes a cake in the face, a punch is thrown at a wedding, and a persistent suitor clambers across a fire escape and second-story ledge of a building. Drug/alcohol use: Adults drink beer, mimosas, wine and other alcoholic beverages. More Family Film Guide reviews

If I could recommend only one chick flick this summer, I would pick "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." In a pinch, "The Perfect Man" will do, but it's not in the same league.

Its heart is in the right place, even if its leading lady -- Hilary Duff -- does so many wrong things along the way. To stave off disasters, she creates chaos at once-in-a-lifetime events, plus she lies to her mother, although in an effort to make her happy and keep her from pulling up stakes yet again.

Jean Hamilton (Heather Locklear) is a single mom and fabulous cake baker with exquisitely bad taste in men. Every time she breaks up with a boyfriend, she and her daughters, ages 16 and 7, pack up the car and U-Haul and move to a new city.

As the movie opens, Jean learns her latest boyfriend is a cheating louse, so she takes the girls -- Holly (Duff) and young Zoe (Aria Wallace) -- to Brooklyn, where a job in a bustling bakery awaits.

Holly settles into a new school and finds a best friend in a classmate named Amy (Vanessa Lengies), while Jean attracts the attention of a co-worker named Lenny (Mike O'Malley), who is nice but clueless and not exactly soulmate material.

To stave off her mother's inevitable desperation and manic moving, Holly invents a secret admirer for Jean. She turns to Amy's suave Uncle Ben (Chris Noth), a restaurateur, for advice on wooing women. Holly follows the playbook Ben doesn't even realize he's writing and also capitalizes on her firsthand knowledge of her mom. Of course, things get out of hand as she tries to keep the ruse going.

At the same time Holly is masterminding her mother's faux relationship, she's avoiding one with a sweet, cute comic book artist (Ben Feldman) from school.

As in all romantic comedies, the truth will come out, but at what price?

"The Perfect Man" requires the audience to believe that a woman who looks like Locklear, even with purposely unflattering hair and makeup, would have trouble finding a man. Well, the right man.

Eager to join an online dating service, Jean says to Holly: "Have you seen these lines? I'm in a race against time." Lines, what lines? And the bakery shop owner addresses Jean's sylphlike shape by inquiring, "You never eat the cakes?"

Tweens and teens will relate to the blogging and instant messaging, along with the dreamy talk about the tug of the moon and how receiving an orchid can make a woman "feel like she's floating on a cloud of infinite possibility." Noth taps back into the Mr. Big vibe he created on "Sex and the City," although Ben lives in a PG-rated world and always makes time for his pestering niece and her friend.

Mark Rosman ("A Cinderella Story," also with Duff) directs this predictable Cinderella story with a twist. Yes, it's about finding Prince Charming but it's also about a woman recognizing her own worth and not measuring herself by the men in her life.

But since it's the movies, you can expect a couple of perfect men of different generations, plus a modern variation of a ball gown and maybe not happily ever after but at least happy for now and the near future.