A Lower Power / Funny, engaging and believable, A Lower Power is a refreshing gay coming-of-age movie, smartly written and well-acted. Its characters, denizens of San Francisco, are smart and witty, if intellectually way ahead of their emotional maturity. But that’s a given in this story of a group of friends leaving high school and making important choices about what comes next, and, it turns out, not being really sure about what they want. That’s the point, of course: Everything is changing fast and characters are learning through experience–often confusing experience. Luckily, these are characters we can care about, thanks to the filmmakers and actors.

Our self-divided main character is “Deaux”–short for Thibodeaux–an attractive, smart but periodically alienated l8-year-old with one foot on a skateboard and one in what his hippie-dippie father calls “adultery.” Reared in the sometimes senselessly sophisticated San Francisco ambiance, Deaux has seen, or heard of, everything; but he doesn’t know what to make of it. He tells himself he wants to swear off sex–he’s practically a virgin–in order to find himself, yet within a short period of time he’s had bathroom sex, mutual masturbation with an allegedly straight friend and gone missionary-position with an old friend. What Deaux says he wants is not happening, but is his theory or his new sexual history “wrong”?

His terrific friend Steve, the smartest guy in the room, pretends to be philosophizing generally but his remarks are plainly aimed at Deaux: “Maybe the real answer is that (people don’t) listen to themselves.” Steve’s not wrong. It takes Deaux a series of painful experiences to see that his life-long best friend has a point–a crucial point.

Take Deaux’s parents, whom he wants to get away from: They’re free spirits who completely accept he’s gay, but their son seems to think they’re a little too free-spirited. They even let Deaux move back in the house when he alienates his housemate. He actually alienates all of his friends, which pisses them off. These are not needy people; they make decisions and distinctions of savvy, evolving Big City types. There’s Mas, a party-going fiend, who is sexually fluid but can’t quite admit it. There’s Emmy, vivacious but not stupidly so. There’s Steve, of course, hurt because it seems he’s losing Deaux’s friendship. There’s a new guy on the scene, who wants Deaux for a boyfriend but sees that’s not an easy or consistent acquisition. The sex is good, Todd is bright and tutorial, but Deaux just doesn’t know himself. Not unusual for someone in his late teens.

This all comes to a head when Deaux has lost just about everyone in his life. It takes a lot of growing up for the precocious “kid” to see what his part in these ongoing conflicts happens to be. How that occurs is moving, thanks to a well-thought-out screenplay and unfussy but relevant camera-play. This is a movie that knows what to leave out as well as what to include, so there’s little repetition in the sharp, witty dialogue.

The sex in the film is graphic but not exploitatively so, and lots of what’s said and done in those scenes ring resoundingly true. In an era of deeply shallow gay films–one-liners by desperately needy people who think scoring is all–it validates its own theme: It’s a movie that knows what it really wants, gets behind that and delivers something well worth seeing.

A Lower Power rises head and shoulders above other comedy-dramas in this year’s fest because it’s about something: It’s not just about what it means to be gay but what it means to be human, a difficult theme to carry off, especially in a film that wants to deliver a certain number of laughs. This movie is funny the way life is funny: close-up with a lot of pain. At a moderate distance it’s just another chapter in the human comedy.

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