Starring Connor Jessup, Alexia Fast, and Michael Buie. Rated 14A.

The lesson is: if you have a revenge fantasy—even if it’s just the one about putting a cat turd in your boss’s coffee—don’t write it on the Internet. Actually, don’t write anything on the Internet.

This is the mistake that smart, sensitive high-school outcast Sean (Connor Jessup) makes in the raw and thoughtful Canadian-made Blackbird. He’s a transplanted city goth kid who likes pentagrams; his dream revenge scenario involves going Columbine on the hockey players who bully him in his new, uh, hockey town; and he blogs it. Also, his dad, Ricky (Michael Buie), is a deer hunter with a home arsenal, so the cops and the entire town freak out.

What follows? Let’s just say that when we see Sean reading Franz Kafka, hell, yes, it’s a metaphor for the totally Kafkaesque nightmare that ensues. That includes a judicial system that steamrolls the innocent into pleading guilty, and some fellow juvenile-detention inmates with dangerously poor social skills.

Blackbird’s writer-director, Jason Buxton, elicits the sort of naturalistic performances from his actors that make characters feel like real people: angry and afraid, awkward and alienated. And Jessup has a low-key chemistry with Alexia Fast, playing Deanna, a popular girl struggling with the realization, as some of us do, that she’s also a weirdo individualist.

Troublesomely, Buxton’s pacing is so unrushed that it starts to feel like we’re all serving double time for bad behaviour. May we remove the leg irons and rub our ankles?

But Jessup’s quietly resolute Sean shows that it takes guts to be different, especially in small, dreary towns, and that people have stupidly long memories and lousy insight into teenage brains. Sean, you need to move far, far away and stick to your own truths—especially the one about how real goths don’t listen to Marilyn Manson.