Starring Jacob Tremblay. Rated PG.

Director Stephen Chbosky nailed the coming-of-age story in his endearing The Perks of Being a Wallflower. With Wonder, he’s gone one better.

Child-actor-of-the-minute, Vancouver’s Jacob Tremblay (Room) returns to the screen as August “Auggie” Pullman, a likable, precocious child born with severe genetic facial abnormalities. Understandably, he’s not a fan of public outings. Recognizing that it’s not healthy for their kid to be walking around wearing a full-face astronaut helmet at 10-years-old, parents Nate (perennial-nice-guy Owen Wilson) and Isabel—an overbearingly maternal Julia Roberts—decide to enrol him in middle school.

As Auggie finally embraces the world outside his bedroom, Chbosky stretches his coming-of-age narrative to explore what it means to self-actualize across multiple generations. Auggie’s mother, relieved of homeschooling duties, is able to return to her master’s thesis, and his teenaged sister—Homefront’s Izabela Vidovic—finally emerges from her brother’s shadow. It’s uplifting stuff; stirring rather than saccharine.

The movie comes into its own in the playground scenes. Kids are cruel, and some of Auggie’s aggressors are particularly creative—take 20 bonus points if you manage to spot all the Star Wars insults. But as Auggie begins to win over his peers, the film beautifully juggles different characters’ points of view, allowing the supporting cast of bright-eyed youngster Noah Jupe (Suburbicon) and Aloha actor Danielle Rose Russell to take centre stage in their own mini-chapters. These alternative perspectives are used to great narrative effect—not least to emphasize that, like with Auggie himself, it’s impossible to take things at face value.

Don’t mistake this movie for a self-righteous flick, however—far from it. Like Wallflower, the film might have more morals in its subtext than a volume of proverbs—beauty is only skin deep; don’t judge a book by its cover; actions speak louder than words, etc.—but Chobsky resists the urge to vocalize those sentiments. Instead, Tremblay’s captivating performance, even with his face immobilized by a hodgepodge of prosthetics, shows rather than tells. The perfect mix of reticent and boisterous, Tremblay is deeply relatable, allowing audiences to quickly see past his deformities and tackle the more pressing issues at hand: those of class, prejudice, and kindness.

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