As if guided by something outside of itself, a movie will sometimes exhibit a seamless confluence of quality, vision, and timing. Writer-director Keith Behrman has one of these magical little beauties on his hands with Giant Little Ones, opening Friday (March 29), a film that nails our cultural moment with its tale of three high-school teens abruptly seized by sexual and gender personas in revolt.

“People like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, all those people who played both sides of the feminine-masculine thing, I wonder if they were the ones prying the lid off,” the 55-year-old former Vancouverite ponders. “Now it’s more explicit. It’s become mainstream. When suburban kids once dressed like punk outlaws, now everyone is becoming a gender outlaw.”

Behrman lives in Toronto but reaches the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles after a day of meetings. This points to the buzz generated by Giant Little Ones, which also made it into the Toronto International Film Festival’s top 10 list of Canadian films for 2018 and garnered a best-Canadian-screenplay award from the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. That script might have been downloaded from some sort of zeitgeist cloud directly into Behrman’s head, coming to him after a sabbatical that took the filmmaker into ashrams and monasteries around the globe.

“I got to the point,” he reports, “where I pretty clearly saw that our ideas, our beliefs, our identity—it’s all just made up. It’s all a construct that we become without necessarily choosing it.”

For swim-team stars Franky (Josh Wiggins) and Ballas (Darren Mann), identity is thrown into serious unrest after a drunken sexual encounter between the two lifelong friends on Franky’s 17th birthday. While the fallout makes a pariah of Franky, Ballas copes by going full jock and turning on his friend. Into the middle walks Ballas’s little sister, Natasha (Kelowna’s Taylor Hickson), also dealing with her own marginalization inside the fraught arena of teen life.

Crisply shot by Guy Godfree (Maudie) and featuring a chiming Michael Brook soundtrack, Behrman’s film is plunked directly inside the clean suburban streets of middle-class North America. (Actually Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, looking remarkably spiffy, contra to its identity.) Behrman rounds out his cast with Maria Bello and Kyle MacLachlan as Franky’s parents, separated after Dad’s recent discovery of his own fluid sexuality.

“He’s in these iconic films,” Behrman says of MacLachlan, still audibly jazzed to have directed the guy he associates with the formative experience of seeing Blue Velvet. “But it was lovely to work with someone of that stature who was so humble and kind and generous. It was fun. A pleasure.”

Still, the director attests, the greatest pleasure was landing on his three young leads. And it’s Vancouverite Mann who, arguably, has the toughest job, telegraphing an interior universe of conflict while maintaining his alpha status as the golden boy Ballas. His Instagram handle is #TheEastVanKid, but Mann is at home in L.A. when he tells the Straight about the almighty hustle he mounted to win the part.

“I would throw Keith a text, see how he was doing, kinda casually check in,” he says with a chuckle. “I even showed up to a reunion screening of his first film, Flower & Garnet, just to show him my face again, just to get in his head as much as I could. It seemed to work. Here we are. I stalked him for a little while.”

The 29-year-old onetime Killarney secondary student is hardly short of work, being probably most familiar as Luke Chalfant in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. But he was hungry for the role of Ballas, partly because it resonated with his experiences in pro minor-league hockey. Behrman calls him “a scrapper”.

“For sure,” Mann says, “especially being a smaller-statured guy, I really had to create a character that didn’t crumble under pressure, whether it was from the bigger guys or not having a dad. It was definitely a different person to who I was behind closed doors to, say, my mom or my brother. I put on a tougher persona to that hockey world.”

The parallels to a much less actualized Ballas are obvious, although Mann was otherwise taken by the quality of Berhman’s script—“It was such a unique way to go about the story. The Hollywood ending would have tied everything up in a nice little bow”—and inspired by the opportunity to push his acting chops.

“The layers and dynamics of the character,” he says. “I wanted to make sure I could show all sides and not just make him some bully that kicks someone’s ass at the convenience store. There’s so much more going on.”

Beyond all that, Mann adds, the timing was spectacular: of all the identity campaigns taken up by the millennial and iGenerations, gender and sexuality arguably occupy the major front. “I think the younger generation has become a lot more accepting,” Mann remarks of the kids coming up behind him. “When you’re raised with it as such a normal thing, it just becomes ingrained.”

Indeed, while Giant Little Ones has been praised by youth advocates of the LGBT community, it’s probably worth leaving this story on a pointed half quip provided by Mann. “Ultimately,” he says, “I hope it’s the older generations that can be helped by the film.”