Starring Logan Lerman. Rated 14A

Almost nothing that unfolds in this perfectly modulated Philip Roth adaptation would get a college student in serious trouble today. Still, the directorial debut from James Schamus, known especially for writing and/or producing Ang Lee classics like Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, asks us to overlay the stifling conformity of the early 1950s onto our own relative freedoms and ask what they mean.

Former child star Logan Lerman (from The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the Percy Jackson movies) plays Marcus Messner, who leaves postwar Newark, New Jersey, for the green, not to mention goyish, pastures of Ohio’s fictional Winesburg College. (Taken from the 2008 novel, that name is an autobiographical nod to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, so influential in Roth’s own youth.) Logan’s lucky to escape the draft at the onset of the Korean War, and from the suffocating protection of his kosher-butcher dad (Danny Burstein), traumatized by the still-recent Holocaust. The levelheaded family leader is Mom, movingly played by Linda Emond (like Burstein, a top theatre vet).

Determined to concentrate on pre-law studies, Marcus drops baseball, refuses to join the only Jewish fraternity on campus, and ignores his roommates—a loutish hothead (Philip Ettinger) and a closeted theatre major (Boardwalk Empire’s young Ben Rosenfield). Of course, that’s before he meets a blond beauty called Olivia Hutton (Canada’s Sarah Gadon, on the brink of real stardom). She’s from a whole different social register and brainy as hell, so on their first date, when Olivia gets flirty like it’s 1999, Marcus is even more freaked out than he is turned on.

This single event determines the rest of the dark, sparely told tale, utterly allergic to honeyed nostalgia. The deeply rewarding film is bookended by hints of war and, further in, a pair of unforgettable prizefights between the articulate, if squeamish, lad and the school’s smilingly dictatorial dean (playwright turned actor Tracy Letts), who thinks chapel is the most important part of a solid education. Undercurrents of racism, class snobbery, institutional militarism, and fundamentalist frenzy electrify their debates. And if that doesn’t sound like 2016, what does?