David Duchovny grew up in New York's scrappy Greenwich Village while the neighborhood was still wild, before gentrification set in and the city decided to plant a garden where the gothic Women's House of Detention once loomed. Drawing from equal parts imagination and experience, the X-Files star constructs his writing/directing debut House of D as a nostalgic look back at early-'70s New York and, more importantly, at the raffish adolescence he spent there.

Few filmmakers seem to understand their teen heroes quite like Duchovny, a quality that has everything to do with the fact that he approaches his story from an actor's point of view and presents things as his not-quite-13-year-old hero (Anton Yelchin) would feel them. Look at the way he refines his characters with weird and wonderful details: Tommy's mother (Téa Leoni) barges in to use the restroom while he showers, then drops her cigarette in the bowl when she's finished. When Tommy urinates, he amuses himself by trying to sink the stubs floating on the surface. I can't think of another movie that has paid attention to such intimacies, and yet, there's a great deal we can conclude about Tommy and his mother from these candid moments.

Here's a boy awkwardly adjusting to the mysteries of puberty who, by the end of the film, will be faced with several extraordinarily serious decisions. The movie is honest about the way young men joke about girls and sex, and touching when Tommy interacts with his two closest friends (a faceless criminal played by Erykah Badu and a 41-year-old "retard" that offers Robin Williams a performance that would impress us more if he hadn't exhausted us with so many other droll roles in the past), but such fleeting poignancies are all engineered towards the fluke misunderstanding that will force Tommy to grow up overnight and run away to Paris — which is where the movie goes sour.

Duchovny bookends his story with a modern-day framing device that takes all that has gone so well until this point and turns it cloyingly sentimental. No sooner has Tommy's reason for running away unfolded on screen than Duchovny, as the adult counterpart who never returned to New York, is atoning for it three decades later. The movie presents Tommy's crisis and its resolution back-to-back, with little to suggest the years of damage that would require such a feel-good epilogue. There's something almost insulting about the idea that his catharsis should come while revisiting the Women's "House of D" a mere mile and a half away from Ground Zero, a site with far greater personal impact to any New Yorker who can remember watching the Trade Center's twin towers go up in 1970 and '71.

—Peter Debruge