“My Friend Dahmer” is a good movie.

It’s a great graphic novel.

The movie opened in Cleveland a couple weeks ago, one of the first markets to get the low-budget feature, which has earned about $500,000 at the box office so far. Not only was it shot in northeast Ohio, it takes place here.

Jeffrey Dahmer, convicted of raping, murdering and / or dismembering 16 men and boys, lived in Bath and graduated from Revere High School in 1978. His first murder, the only one attributed to him in Ohio, was committed at his family’s home shortly after graduation.

The film is based on a graphic novel by John “Derf” Backderf, a northeast Ohio artist who drew the comic “The City” that appeared in the free weekly Cleveland Edition and more than 140 publications nationwide.

Derf was as close to a friend as Dahmer had in high school, although one of the things that makes his graphic novel so compelling is how he wrestles with how he and his friends treated Dahmer. He essentially was their mascot. They let Dahmer hang out with him at lunch, but they also exploited his eccentricities, encouraging him to fake seizures in school hallways or the local mall.

Their grand prank during senior year was to sneak Dahmer into different club photos taken for the yearbook, inserting him into the literary club and the National Honor Society. Dahmer also was frequent inspiration for Derf’s artwork. In a the movie, a girl asks Derf if Dahmer is his muse.

While they apparently were Dahmer’s lone source of companionship, they also ignored his excessive drinking, his tense home life and his increasingly disturbing behavior.

“My Friend Dahmer” isn’t a sympathetic portrait of the serial killer. Dahmer’s necrophilic urges and murderous behavior already were gestating when the book and the movie start. Dahmer’s childhood hobby was finding road kill animals and bleaching their bones to preserve them, and it’s a skill he put to use on his human victims.

But it does tell the story of a damaged young man in a family too consumed with its own problems to recognize how troubled he was and no other support system.

Ross Lynch, who plays Dahmer, starred on The Disney Channel’s “Austin & Ally” series and appeared in its “Teen Beach” movies. I think that added to the creepiness of his portrayal for my daughters, who at least were aware of those shows, but for me he was a blank slate.

That made his portrayal more powerful for me. His Dahmer has to convey inner turmoil while being largely non-reactive to the abuse of the outside world and his internal desires.

Alex Wolff, a veteran of the Nickelodeon series “The Naked Brothers Band,” is equally good as Derf. He isn’t malicious in his treatment of Dahmer; he’s more oblivious that he’s exploiting him.

The movie embellishes Derf’s final encounter with Dahmer, trying to make it more cinematically menacing, but it’s mostly faithful to the book.

It’s also filled with authentic touches that will appeal to local audiences. Dahmer’s first victim was a hitchhiker who was coming back from a Michael Stanley Band concert at Chippewa Lake Park. MSB is on the soundtrack, and WMMS DJ Denny Sanders can be heard on the car radio. Derf is a punk fan, and Wolff wears a T-shirt for the Akron punk club The Bank in several scenes, and the soundtrack also includes such Ohio bands as Rocket from the Tombs, The Bizarros and 15-60-75 The Numbers Band.

I’d recommend the movie, and I don’t expect it will get any closer to the Mahoning Valley than greater Cleveland. But I strongly recommend the graphic novel.

The Dahmer elements are fascinating, but the book also works as a portrait of high school life in the late ’70s. I graduated two years after Derf and Dahmer and so many of the little details of school life rang true.

It’s also a book that made me think about the odd, quiet outcasts I went to school with, where they are now and how I treated them then.