Michael Melski didn’t grow up with pot-cultivating parents like those in Growing Op, a coming-of-age comedy shot in New Brunswick. But the writer-director was raised in a Maritimes suburb something like the bland subdivision seen in the film, which stars young Steven Yaffee as a home-schooled teen yearning to break out of his parents’ cloister of cannabis and antiestablishment attitudes.

“I’m definitely a child of the suburbs,” Melski says on the phone from Fredericton, New Brunswick, where the Silver Wave Film Festival has just begun.

“During high school in Nova Scotia, I had a girlfriend whose dad had a grow op; he was more like a winemaker—a farmer more than a purveyor of drugs—and I realized this was a fascinating subculture.”

Almost four years ago, the seed was planted for this feature (opening here Friday [November 21] ) while the Mile Zero screenwriter was living in Vancouver and busy directing episodes of Robson Arms.

“I was driving to work, listening to the news, and it seemed like grow ops were being busted almost every day. Remember that this was before [TV’s] Weeds. My experience as a youth in Nova Scotia started connecting with my adulthood in Vancouver, and I liked the idea of a family on the run, making fun of suburban mores even as the son is becoming enamoured of those mores. It’s as archetypal, in its way, as Star Wars.”

Despite these Canuck origins, Growing Op is set in a generically pre-Obama USA.

“The movie is very much of its time. Its conflicts are all products of that Republican cloud, and I hope we are coming out from under that now. In any case, many people think it speaks to them, and Canadians need to make movies that aren’t so regional these days.”

There were plans to hire a bigger-name American for the lead role of noninhaling teen Quinn Dawson. But the part eventually fell to likable, television-trained Yaffee.

“He just jumped off the tape. He was awkward and funny, possessing that dark, hooded innocence the part required—a lovely vulnerability. I call him a geek heartthrob.”

The film also stars indie veteran Rosanna Arquette and CSI: Las Vegas’s Wallace Langham as the lad’s lovingly overbearing parents, as well as Katie Boland as the crabby kid sister who moves her parents’ crop to local kids in areas as wholesome as the back yards of Blue Velvet.

“I was a paperboy,” Melski explains, “and that gave me a unique glimpse into suburban lives. This story was specific to me, in a way, and my experience of the world. Quinn is me for sure, in terms of his sense of his wonder-slash-horror at the world. Here you’ve got teenage girls taking botox; jocks who like musicals but pretend they don’t; everyone is at war with their own natures; and everything he thought was normal was complete lie. Of course, hormones are raging too, and I can attest to that.”

Meanwhile, the filmmaker is about to see what’s raging in Atlantic Canada as his baby debuts back there.

“It’s showing tonight, in fact, and I’m excited. There’s lots of buzz in the air. I think you can actually smell it.”