Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #86: Daydream Nation (2010).

Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings) is living every popular teenager's nightmare: moving with her widowed father (Ted Whittall) from the big smoke to the sleepy rural Canadian town of Hargrove, where a serial killer is currently on the loose. As all her classmates appear to be on perpetual benders, Caroline's frustration about her relocation is compounded. However, sparking some interest in her is her young teacher Mr. Anderson (Josh Lucas), whose own personal life is complicated and lonely. She also bonds with kind but tormented classmate Thurston (Reece Thompson), whose three best mates are practically drug dealers. Now Caroline must choose between her two potential suitors while adjusting to her new surroundings and managing both her father's needs and her very acerbic attitude.

Daydream Nation, whose title comes from an album by Sonic Youth (whose frontman is another Thurston, Moore), is an utterly strange but beguiling coming-of-age movie. Writer-director Mike Goldbach takes the regular arch of a cynical teenage girl's sexual and emotional reawakening and warps it with an infusion of existential motifs, arthouse cinema references (including to Atom Egoyan and Roman Polanski, most explicitly), rich dream and flashback sequences and brief but surprisingly graphic scenes of violence. He thankfully keeps it unpretentious despite this thanks to familiar but accurate character tropes and dynamics, and a largely A-list cast who all shine. Dennings gets every beat right in how she depicts Caroline's trajectory, Lucas and Thompson both make their rivals for her affections into pathetic but sympathetic guys, and Andie MacDowell brings delicateness and glamour to Thurston's single mum Enid, who hooks up with Caroline's dad.

Daydream Nation is not for everybody, but if you're after a very much left-of-centre bildungsroman, like a female The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it will quite easily sit with you as it does with me.