Given its familiar coming-out territory, "C.R.A.Z.Y." should by all rights be a dull ride, or at least a predictable one. But Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée layers his tale (in French with subtitles) with enough pop-cultural texture and humor to make it pleasantly surprising. Driven by comic surrealistic sequences, inventive camerawork, and a soundtrack that veers from Pink Floyd to Patsy Cline, Zac's journey moves along swiftly and buoyantly. Only the last half-hour succumbs to ponderousness, as Vallée strains to make Zac into an epic hero. After our boy has left home and is shown crawling through a desert, parched and desperate, "C.R.A.Z.Y." truly plods.
Vallée also nicely distinguishes his movie by resisting simplistic notions of gay and straight. Zac isn't heterosexual, and he probably isn't bisexual, but the script doesn't push him into making any narrow declarations. "C.R.A.Z.Y." is about a kid finding out who he is, in all its ineffability, and not about a kid accepting and proclaiming a cultural definition.
Zac's family life is a kind of foreign-movie equivalent to "Malcolm in the Middle." The five boys bicker and argue raucously, and Zac generally ends up getting picked on for being a "fairy." His mother protects him, particularly since a local seer (who also sells Tupperware) has said that Zac has a healing gift. But Gervais bullies him about being more stereotypically masculine and going out with girls, and Zac desperately wants his father's approval. At one point, almost grudgingly, Zac begins a sexual relationship with a female friend. Meanwhile, in the background, Zac's brothers encounter drug problems, marriage, and jail.
The tension between Gervais and Zac forms the heart of the movie. With the help of a pair of vivid performances, these two characters have the specificity that most of the others lack. Marc-André Grondin manages to make Zac sympathetic despite his self-loathing, while Michael Côté captures Gervais's nobility without sentimentalizing him or diminishing his rough edges. It's hard to pinpoint a storyline in "C.R.A.Z.Y.," as it wanders among the highs and lows of a fairly ordinary family. But the lingering images from the movie are those between father and son, as they negotiate both distance and closeness.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog.
