Starring Kacey Mottet Klein. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

The thin line between love and hate dissolves almost entirely in Being 17, a deeply satisfying coming-of-age and coming-out tale set at the picturesque foot of the Pyrenees by director André Téchiné.

There’s little that jug-eared, middle-class Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life) and the willowy, adopted farm boy Thomas (newcomer Corentin Fila) share in common, besides being picked last for a school basketball game—a humiliation suffered by both boys in the film’s opening scene—and an inexplicable antipathy to one another that frequently explodes into violence. It must be love!

Working from a script coauthored by the significantly younger Céline Sciamma (whose Girlhood masterfully evoked the rhythms of modern youth), the 70-year-old Téchiné wants to capture adolescent lust in its dynamic equilibrium with confused rage, made even more complicated when it’s queer.

“I don’t know if I’m into guys or just you,” Damien eventually confesses to Thomas, receiving a split lip for his troubles. That Téchiné achieves this goal with astonishing subtlety is beyond dispute, although it takes some heavy plot contrivances to get there.

As the town doctor, Damien’s mom (Sandrine Kiberlain) happens to treat Thomas’s mother on the very day that the two boys launch their yearlong fisticuffs campaign. (Sly Damien has been training with a family friend and he wins that round.) And so it transpires that Thomas is invited to live with his best enemy’s family while his mother battles through a dangerously tough pregnancy.

If that screams “plot” a little too loudly, it also affords the chance to watch these two young actors simmer and swan around each other as Being 17 teases its way to a payoff made more profound by its uneasiness. It’s the unimpeachable naturalism of Being 17 that eventually wins out, even against the hokey signalling of a second-act twist that otherwise broadens the film’s convincing emotional scope. That line between staginess and emotional truth is also pretty thin, it seems.