Veteran director Bruce McDonald brings a light touch to theatre great Daniel MacIvor’s presumably autobiographical tale of young teens getting ready to leave rural Cape Breton in 1976.

Dylan Authors is good as ambitious Kit, starting to question his own sexuality, with Wet Bum’s Julia Sarah Stone even better as his would-be girlfriend who has ambitions of her own. But the real star is cinematographer Becky Parsons for capturing so much melancholy beauty in her low-contrast black-and-white images. There’s also a raft of Canadian songs from the ’70s to help compensate for the screenplay’s odd collapse about an hour in when Kit catches up with his unstable mother, frantically played by Molly Parker. Having the spectre of Andy Warhol following the boy was a cute notion that probably should have stayed on paper.