Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts wanted to make a film that sat somewhere between Stand by Me and an art movie. With The Kings of Summer—an offbeat Sundance hit about three boys who ditch their suffocating home lives and build a ramshackle home for themselves in the woods—he’s somehow managed to conjure the very texture of teenage life.

“I felt this responsibility,” Vogt-Roberts tells the Georgia Straight by phone from Detroit, his hometown. “Like, ‘Okay, I’m making this coming-of-age story, so how do I tell this in a new way? What are we gonna add to this conversation?’ Especially now, when everything’s in this sort of post–Wes Anderson quirk world.”

Vogt-Roberts cheerfully admits that he nearly suffered “an aneurysm” when he read, well into preproduction, that Anderson was at work on Moonrise Kingdom, “a movie about boys in the woods”, as he puts it. But that’s where any similarity ends. The Kings of Summer (opening Friday [June 7] ) hinges on the soulful performances of Nick Robinson as Joe and Gabriel Basso as his best friend, Patrick, two teens struggling to cultivate convincing facial hair, among other signposts of manhood, as they try to live away from home and off the land (or out of the dumpster behind the supermarket).

Providing the broader comic aspect is Biaggio (Moises Arias), a vertically challenged oddity of indeterminate ethnicity. A scene-stealing Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) drums up yet more guffaws as Joe’s “likable jerk” of a father (in Vogt-Roberts’s words), along with Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson as Patrick’s overweening parents. But it’s the sudden shifts in tone, mirroring the mood swings of adolescence, that give The Kings of Summer its unique feel.

“I think that comedy is useless without drama,” Vogt-Roberts offers. “When you confuse the two, when you can slalom between them, that’s what makes things funny, that’s what makes things real, because there’s weight and there are stakes.”

Casting is the other big challenge. “One of the things I did that was really important to me was I sent the kids through improv training,” he says, noting that his favourite scene—involving a sort of ritual dance on a big metal pipe—was made up on the spot, with audio recorded on his iPhone. “Not so that they’d be riffing every moment or trying to be funny,” he continues, “but just because I really specifically didn’t want to cast 22-year-olds as teenagers. I wanted to cast kids who were close to the age so they would be able to bring their teenage brain to it a little bit and to have a sense of authorship over these roles. Because in my mind, even if it was hilarious it would have been a complete failure if there wasn’t a handful of moments where you’d go, ‘Oh, right, that’s what it is to be that age; that’s what that nostalgia is; that’s what youth is.’ ”

All that aside, if The Kings of Summer works, it’s probably because the filmmaker himself has managed to hang onto his residual teenage brain. When he calls the Straight, Vogt-Roberts is getting ready to attend the film’s premiere in the Motor City. “Which effectively translates to a screening for my grandmother,” he says with a snort.