Starring Aaron Webber, Daniel MacIvor, and Rebecca Jenkins. Rated 18A. Plays Friday to Thursday, March 10 to 16, at the Vancity Theatre

A strong cast and some unpredictable turns make this Novia Scotia-set tale a very different kind of coming-out story. In recent years, there have been quite a few who-am-I stories with a sexual- identity twist (C.R.A.Z.Y. comes quickly to mind). But it's not actually clear that Whole New Thing's central protagonist, 13-year-old Emerson Thorsen (impressive newcomer Aaron Webber) is even gay.

Things heat up when the previously home-schooled kid, the only child of hippie parents struggling with their fading ideals, goes to public school for the first time. Being the smartest, most articulate fellow in class, he would already be in trouble, but his pasty complexion and androgynous demeanour mark him as an instant outsider. And that's even before he develops a nebulous crush on a soulful if uncomfortably closeted teacher played by Daniel MacIvor, who cowrote the script with director Amnon Buchbinder (The Fishing Trip).

If that situation weren't awkward enough, Emerson's environmental-activist dad (theatre veteran Robert Joy) is currently so absorbed in shoring up his failing influence that he doesn't even notice that his more playful wife (Vancouver's Rebecca Jenkins) is drifting into an affair with a local roughneck (Callum Keith Rennie, who maybe should take a break from these kinds of characters).

The film is cleverly observed, with lots of terrific dialogue. And there's an acute sense of the harshly beautiful winter landscape (it was shot in the Halifax area) as a field essentially hostile to the happiness of the main players-something felt most acutely during the teacher's alienating encounters with anonymous men at a roadside public restroom just outside of town.

There's a rush toward forced melodrama at the end, with a chase scene that feels blandly conventional. Still, that doesn't obscure the many thorny and amusing moments that went before. Anyway, the last word comes early, when bullying classmates ask Emerson if he's straight or gay. His answer: "Who says you have to choose?"