Starring Dylan Authors. Rated PG

In Weirdos, famed Canadiana director Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, Highway 61) brings an appropriately light road-movie touch to theatre great Daniel MacIvor’s presumably autobiographical tale of teens preparing to leave rural Nova Scotia in 1976. Young TV veteran Dylan Authors is good as ambitious Kit, starting to question his own sexuality, with Wet Bum’s Julia Sarah Stone even better as his ostensible girlfriend, who has ambitions of her own, as well as a sensible head on her shoulders.

Still, the film’s real star, making her feature debut here, is cinematographer Becky Parsons, who captures so much melancholy beauty in her low-contrast black-and-white images of the rural Maritimes. There’s also a raft of Canadian songs from the ’70s, set against celebrations of the U.S. bicentennial, droning on TV and radio news in the background.

The music helps compensate for the screenplay’s odd collapse, less than an hour in, when Kit catches up with his unstable estranged mother, too frantically presented by Molly Parker, playing the part as Tennessee Williams might remember a neurotic parent, not as a believably damaged human being. The Republic of Doyle’s Allan Hawko, on the other hand, is allowed to give Kit’s confused dad a few more dimensions.

Having the spectre of Andy Warhol (Rhys Bevan-John) follow the boy from Antigonish to Sydney was a cute notion that probably should have stayed on paper. Although its last half-hour battles with dramatic inertia, the 90-minute tale ends on a positive note, and veteran Canada watchers will enjoy its echoes of NFB highway odes like Goin’ Down the Road and Nobody Waved Goodbye.