The new film Little Men is a painfully accurate portrait of childhood friendship

Between the Duffer brothers' amazingly successful and creepy Netflix series Stranger Things and Ira Sachs' new film Little Men (out August 5), this summer feels rich in ambitious, dreamy, and sad coming-of-age projects that let younger actors shine. Childhood is back to being a subject directors and writers take up with some care, and the results are beautiful if — frankly — a little odd. That's as it should be: Childhood is weird, and the peculiar tilt of the field on which kids meet is a huge part of the drama of growing up and growing apart.

Little Men is about that tilt: Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri play the leads in this film — written by Sachs and his frequent collaborator Mauricio Zacharias — about two boys in Brooklyn. Taplitz plays Jake Jardine, the son of a psychotherapist (Jennifer Ehle) and a semi-successful actor (Greg Kinnear) whose grandfather dies, leaving the family a house in Brooklyn with a storefront downstairs. Barbieri plays Tony Calvalli, the son of a Chilean seamstress (Paulina García) who for years has being renting that storefront for a nominal sum. The boys become friends as the adults become enemies — this is just as much a story about family and friendship and class and gentrification in New York. The film's secret villain is money, and its secret theme is the adaptive amnesia kids develop when forced (by circumstances they don't understand) to fall in and out of love.

A sweet and maddeningly incomplete portrait of a friendship, Little Men concludes as unexpectedly as the friendship it tracks; the ending is small and oblique and punishing. If you're anything like me, you might leave the theater hating the film just a little for what it showed and — crucially — for what it didn't. But the more I thought about my resentment, the more fitting it seemed: Adult drama is so often the cause of the endings kids don't get.

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And this is really good adult drama.

A standout scene in the film involves Kinnear's character Bryan and García's character Leonor, whom he tries to evict. It's a treat to watch Kinnear at his most skillfully awkward opposite an enormous talent like García. (American viewers may know García from Narcos, The 33, and the highly praised film Gloria. Chileans will know her from — among other things — the Chilean mini-series Los Archivos del Cardenal, where she played Mónica Spencer.)

García is spellbinding as Leonor. Distant and lethargic with a smoky demeanor that scans as alternately evasive or resigned, she shifts gears imperceptibly in this scene and starts slicing at Kinnear's slumped and apologetic Bryan with a cruelty that's only heightened by the fact that it takes place in the exact same lethargic register, highlighting her lack of interest in him, her total contempt.

Little Men is in dialogue with a lot of literature — it's named for Louisa May Alcott's book of the same name, and Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" makes a major appearance — but its main intertext is Chekhov's play The Seagull. The male principals in Little Men (like many of the main characters in that play) all want to be artists or actors, and the film is at least as much about artistry and anxiety — about freedom and loss and the parts of existence you sacrifice to your ambition — as it is about anything else.

Still, the main resemblance between The Seagull and Little Men is structural: Little Men feels like a play. If everyone speaks in a way that seems ever so slightly stilted — injecting exposition or philosophy into moments that don't necessarily provoke them — it works. The film feels rangy and stylized, but every scene sharpens to an odd and unexpected point. (A scene in which Kinnear loses his temper in the car with Jennifer Ehle and the two boys is especially effective.)

What works less well — and this is very minor, but it bears mentioning — are the accents. I wish more films and TV shows would incorporate Spanish the way Little Men does, but I also wish they did it with the care we take with accents in English, not letting Australian pass for British or British for American. García's accent is obviously Chilean, but the same cannot be said for her "Chilean friend" Hernán (played by Alfred Molina). Molina's a fabulous actor, but he can't pass for Chilean when he speaks Spanish and should not have been asked to try.

That quibble aside, this is a lovely thing. Barbieri is a fizzy, charismatic delight, and Taplitz complements his verve with a precise and nerdy awkwardness that collapses spectacularly when it needs to. Little Men jangles with warmth and loss, and if it tells a story about New York we've heard many times before, the story it tells about childhood — about how people turn a corner and vanish — stings at least as much as it sings.