A vivid and human evocation of what it's like to be 19, with the world at your feet and above your head.

No one talks much about turning 19. It doesn’t come with the avalanche of adult rights that comes with turning 18, nor the symbol of 21. Technically, you’re still a teenager, but you don’t feel like one. Still, the approach of your twenties is daunting, as if a chapter of your youth is about to close. In other words, it’s a corridor age, and Leonardo, the 19-year-old protagonist of Italian writer-director Giovanni Tortorici’s exceptional feature debut, “Diciannove,” feels that transitory, overlooked, neither-here-nor-there angst.

As Leonardo struggles through his first year of college, searching for a clear idea of ​​what he’s supposed to be, the safe ground of childhood eludes him, and adulthood hovers defiantly out of reach. Tortorici obviously remembers that disorienting feeling of being released (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before he’s truly found himself; if you don’t, his funny, edgy, shapeless film will give you shivering flashbacks. It’s an auspicious arrival for the filmmaker and for his intense, moody young star Manfredi Marini, who holds the camera with a newcomer’s candor and a natural’s ease.

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Produced by Luca Guadagnino, for whom Tortorici had previously worked as an assistant director, “Diciannove” (which means “nineteen” in Italian and seems to have been retained as the international title) sounds familiar on paper: another coming-of-age study centered on a charismatic but childish teenage girl with unfulfilled desires, big ideas and much to discover on all fronts. What makes it distinctive and unusually authentic within this subgenre is that it eschews the carefully poignant growth arc that tends to give such stories their backbone. “Diciannove” zigzags tumultuously with the erratic moods and impulses of Leonardo da Vinci, providing him with no life lessons or self-realization, just the jagged fragments of knowledge and sometimes dark lived experience that eventually make up a person.

The film introduces us to Leonardo as he is about to make what should be a formative life change: packing his bags to leave his family home in Palermo for London, where he is to begin business studies, while his mother (Maria Pia Ferlazzo) worries about the neurotic state of an empty nester. It’s a giant leap into the world for someone who grew up entirely on an island, and Leonardo—who is bright, curious, well-read and, we soon learn, coming to terms with his burgeoning homosexuality—clearly wants to be part of something bigger. But he dreads the journey, prone to severe nosebleeds that seem to be a manifestation of his repressed anxieties.

Arriving in London, he is greeted by his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta, terrific) as one prison escapee would greet another with complicity. (Credit to cinematographer Massimiliano Kuveiller for capturing the stark contrast of light between the whitening Sicilian sun and the gloom of the British summer, though for Arianna it is a grey haze of freedom.) Taking a room in her shabby but central Hoxton flat, he is at first swept up in Arianna’s big-city lifestyle of clubbing, binge drinking and casual sex, but the sparkle soon fades and his naivety is exposed: he can’t hold his liquor and his housekeeping skills are a real health hazard.

More importantly, he finally admits to himself that he has no interest in studying business, even though he’s too far from home to pursue his true passion: Italian literature. With a sleek cut—Marco Costa’s snappy editing is in tune with the pace and chaos of youthful whims—he’s on a train to the Tuscan university town of Siena, where he’s enrolled in a literary studies program. It’s a victory for personal autonomy, but it doesn’t mean Leonardo’s life will simply adapt from here on out. He’s still insecure and socially awkward, and soon enough he’s managed to push away his roommates, repel a potential group of friends, and annoy his teachers, whose readings of texts he finds old-fashioned and off-topic. In some ways, he’s right; in other ways, he’s not as brilliant a thinker as he’d like to believe.

But then, at 19, how many people are? With his defensiveness and cocky swagger, Marini manages to balance Leonardo's vulnerability with his surly idiosyncrasies, and his sometimes healthy ego with his solitary doubt. When two girls passing by remark that he's cute – and he may be a little more cute than he thinks – his shy, smug blush as he thanks them is incredibly beautiful.

Tortorici’s cinematography also manages to capture the character’s incessant contradictions, shifting from stark truth to nervous montage to a flourish of animation as Leonardo tries on different versions of himself. Nothing is truly resolved by the end of “Diciannove,” just as nothing is truly resolved when you finally leave your teens behind for your twenties. Leonardo may be distracted by exams, dating apps, and crises of confidence, but he still has time to enjoy the day.

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