Dressed in a sequinned shirt and flared black pants like some teenage Elvis, 17-year-old Kol (Elias Anton), the nervy centre of queer romance Of an Age, cuts a dazzling figure.
In an early sequence, he sprints past rows of ugly, sun-bleached houses and paling fences on a sleepy Melbourne morning, his desperate stride set in stark contrast to the drab, lifeless landscape.
The Australian suburbs can be alienating at the best of times, but if you're an outsider, they might as well be the surface of another planet.
That longing to escape the suffocating world of your youth is given thrilling, expressive flight in the second feature film from talented Macedonian Australian writer-director Goran Stolevski, following on from his witchy Eastern European shapeshifter, last year's You Won't Be Alone.
The filmmaker, who spent his adolescence in Melbourne suburbia, has revisited his youth to craft a film of wonderful intimacy and tangible, electrifying motion, drawing upon those feelings of teenage alienation.
Of an Age begins, fittingly, in a state of disorientation: A teenage girl, Ebony (a livewire Hattie Hook), wakes up alone on an empty Altona beach at dawn, dazed and confused after a blackout night that's left her with scant recollection – and the sudden realisation that she needs to be at an early morning ballroom dance recital.
Hoping to avoid her mother's wrath, she stumbles to a payphone to call her bestie and dance partner, Kol, who already seems on edge even before his desperate suburban dash. When we first meet him, he's shirtless, wearing an intense, haunted look and vogueing to Spanish Eurovision smash Bandido in the garage of his Slavic family home, his lithe movement crackling with the energy and narcissism of a young Travolta.
It's 1999, a week out from the new millennium, but the film's vague spectre of Y2K anxiety – the occasional dial-up gag aside – could be the impending teenage apocalypse of any era. With high-strung performances, jittery, handheld camera work and claustrophobic Academy framing, Of an Age captures that sense of unease synonymous with the immediate aftermath of high school, when the world feels like it might either end or open up to exciting possibility.
For Kol, the latter unexpectedly arrives in the shape of Ebony's older, 20-something brother Adam (Thom Green), who pulls up to the curb in a rust-brown Holden and a tight black tee, looking like a police composite sketch of Gen X movie outsiders, from Johnny Depp and Skeet Ulrich to the social misfits of Gregg Araki's New Queer Cinema. (As if he couldn't get any more 90s dreamboat, one character jokingly describes him as "voted the most likely to bomb the school".)
En route to pick up Ebony, Adam and Kol have an easy rapport that starts to set off sparks, their scenes shot in tight, intimate frames that effectively separate them from their surroundings.
If Adam's unusual choice of driving music – the Brazilian-flavoured soundtrack to Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together – wasn't enough of a hint about his sexuality, he casually drops the revelation that his ex was a boy, prompting Kol, who hasn't yet come out, to clam up and shift into performative straight-guy machismo.
"Just so you know, I'm open-minded – it's totally OK to be gay," Kol tells Adam, back in the latter's bedroom and surrounded by Pedro Almodóvar posters and Tori Amos tapes. (Adam, who's about to leave for a PhD in Argentina, passes Kol his email: "Y Kant Adam Read at Hotmail". Hah.)
Stolevski, who arrived in Australia at age 12 from Macedonia, has discussed his feelings of discomfort as a teenager in his adopted homeland: "Where I was living was not visually beautiful, glamorous or transporting, and I felt my feelings were only related to me," he told The Age last year.
Even so, by revisiting that past, Stolevski finds transcendence in those feelings of isolation, salvaging unlikely glimpses of the sublime from suburbia.
After Kol and Adam meet again later that night in the dying embers of a 21st house party, their car ride into the early hours is something close to magical; their much-delayed kiss, set against eerie transmission towers in the cold light of dawn, seems to happen – like so many of the best suburban memories – out of time and place.
But the movie's teenage reverie is complicated by its ambivalent coda: a flash-forward to 2010 that finds the two lovers, who went their separate ways after that fateful night in 1999, crossing paths on their way to Ebony's wedding.
These scenes, set in and around a typical suburban wedding (with all the expected bad dancing to nostalgic, turn-of-the-millennium needle drops) are remarkable for their emotional clarity.
Rather than assessing youth from some wizened vantage point of age, they catch the flux of adult slipstream, where lives are in the process of change but teenage feelings remain unresolved, waiting to surface at any moment.
It's an extension of the film's canny exploration of the spaces in between, where life is always in motion, and the search for belonging is more powerful than any illusion of contentment.
In a film that tempers its sense of youthful escape with the burden of unrequited longing, it feels appropriate that it should end in that strangest of all purgatories, the suburban hotel room – where you're minutes away from home, but lost in another world entirely.
Of an Age is in cinemas now.
