A Vivid, Humane Evocation of Being Nineteen

Nobody talks much about the age 19. It doesn’t come with the exciting avalanche of adult rights that come with turning 18, or the milestone symbolism of 21. You’re technically still a teenager but don’t feel like one; nonetheless, the looming onset of your twenties is daunting, as if a chapter of your youth is about to close. It’s a corridor age, in other words, and Leonardo, the oh-so-19-year-old protagonist of Italian writer-director Giovanni Tortorici‘s exceptional debut feature “Diciannove,” is feeling its transitional, overlooked, neither-here-nor-there angst.

As Leonardo stumbles through his first year of college, chasing some clear idea of who he’s supposed to be, the secure floor of childhood falls away beneath him, while adulthood hovers tauntingly out of reach. Tortorici evidently remembers that disorienting sense of being released (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before you’ve quite found yourself; if you don’t, his funny, nervy, aptly unformed film will give you quivery flashbacks. It’s an auspicious arrival for both the filmmaker and his intense, mercurial young star Manfredi Marini, who holds the camera with the guilelessness of a newcomer and the ease of a natural.

Produced by Luca Guadagnino, for whom Tortorici previously worked as an assistant director, “Diciannove” (Italian for “nineteen,” and apparently being kept as the international title) seems like familiar fare on paper: another coming-of-age study centered on a coltish but charismatic teen with inchoate desires, big ideas and much to discover on all fronts. What makes it distinctive and unusually authentic within that subgenre is its avoidance of the neatly poignant growth arc that tends to lend such stories their spine. “Diciannove” zig-zags tumultuously with Leonardo’s erratic moods and impulses, bringing him no dewy life lessons or self-realisations — just the irregular fragments of knowledge and sometimes grim lived…