Yosemite

Franco gives one of his most subtle performances yet as a recovering-alcoholic father, and the three young newcomers’ performances are honest and affecting, capturing what it feels like to be adrift and on the verge of adolescence.

Like Gia Coppola's Palo Alto (2013), a lyric and biting evocation of contemporary well-to-do teendom, Gabrielle Demeestere's Yosemite mines Franco's fiction for its most vital quality: his unsentimental depiction of youthful insecurity, this time among fifth-graders.

Resolutely unshowy, sometimes almost too lower-case in its observations, Yosemite pays off in an authenticity that pervades both individual scene rhythms and performances.

Yosemite is a contemplative drama, low-key perhaps to a fault. But Demeestere shows acute sensitivity in her understanding of boys and their growing awareness of the world, with its real and imagined menaces.

Although evocative and nicely observed, the coming-of-age drama Yosemite ultimately proves too low-key and elliptical to make much of an impression.

Ms. Demeestere’s direction winds up frustratingly splitting the difference between thoughtfully detached and just plain vague.

It never adds up to anything more than the mood Demeestere manages to translate from Franco’s fiction. Which makes Yosemite a “film festival movie,” nothing more than a promising idea or two and an interesting tone to recommend it.