On the surface, the titular hero of Robin Campillo and Laurent Cantet’s Enzo seems like your fairly average teenager. Handsome, athletic, relatively friendly, but also introverted, stubborn and a bit volatile, he’s the kind of kid who likes to keep to himself but is constantly yearning for connection, especially outside the family unit.

Perhaps Enzo (promising newcomer Eloy Pohu) is a tad too average, which may explain why this subtle French drama seems to meander more than it really does. Beneath the surface, there are, in fact, some major conflicts brewing in Enzo’s life: He’s been waging a quiet war against his bourgeois parents (Pierfrancesco Favino, Elodie Bouchez), rejecting the typical academic route that his older brother (Nathan Japy) has successfully chosen. And he’s also rejecting the heterosexuality that has been foisted upon him, falling gradually in love with an older Ukrainian bricklayer named Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), whom he meets on a construction site.

The film was directed by Campillo after Cantet fell ill prior to the shoot (he died just over a year ago), and it reflects the sensibility of both filmmakers, although it never quite pulls you in the way their best work has. Much like its protagonist, Enzo seems to be desperately searching for something or someone to grasp onto, knowing full well that such things can easily slip away.

Since the start of their careers, Campillo served both as Cantet’s co-writer and editor on a number of features, including Time Out, Going South and the 2008 Palme d’Or winner The Class. Campillo eventually started directing his own movies, breaking out internationally in 2017 with his AIDS-epoch drama, BPM, which won Cannes’ Grand Prix and was a hit at the French box office.

Both directors have shown a preference for character over plot, building stories around individuals who are filled with desires, fears, flaws and contradictions — individuals who tend to feel more like real people than movie characters. This is certainly the case with the troubled Enzo, who attends a vocational school in the picturesque Côte d’Azur town where he lives, spending a few days a week as an apprentice on the building site of a fancy private home.

We first meet him one afternoon on the job, which he performs without much care or interest, lazily piling bricks into a wall that quickly falls apart. When Enzo’s boss (Philippe Petit) drives him home to discuss his bad attitude with his parents, he’s shocked to discover that the teen lives in a luxurious modern villa overlooking the sea — a house that resembles the very one they’re working on.

Enzo is in fact a rich kid who, for reasons never fully articulated, prefers the blue-collar lifestyle of his fellow workers to the highly educated ways of his family — including a strict if loving father who teaches math. “I don’t want to learn,” he says at one point. “I’m not an artist,” he tells his mom later on, even if he seems to have a knack for drawing, covering his walls with figurative sketches.

Like many teenagers, Enzo doesn’t know what he wants, but he does know what he doesn’t want: the life of his parents and brother, no matter how relatively happy and well-adjusted they seem to be. He’s more attracted to the ways of co-workers Vlad and Miroslav (Vladyslav Holyk), two Ukrainians making ends meet while they escape the war back home, at least for the time being.

Enzo starts spending more time with Vlad, until he — and we — suddenly realize that a love story is emerging. This happens despite the fact that both men appear to be straight: Vlad shows off pics of his female conquests on his phone, while Enzo has a high-school girlfriend (Malou Khebzi) he brings home to go skinny dipping with.

The filmmakers are never conclusive about Enzo’s burgeoning sexuality nor his plans for the future, and that’s clearly by design. They don’t want to hem their young hero in, preferring to let the boy discover himself the way so many kids do at that age. It’s an extremely honest depiction of adolescence, but one that doesn’t always make for compelling drama. The result is a film that fails to pack a sufficient emotional charge, even if it leaves us longing to know where Enzo will go next.

As always, Campillo coaxes strong performances from a cast that mixes professional and amateur talent. Vets Bouchez (Wild Reeds) and Favino (Nostalgia) play a pair of concerned parents who don’t fully understand their son, nor the class hang-ups that plague him, but try to give him as much love and affection as possible. Slivinskyi, an actual construction worker like his character, is quietly disarming as an affable refugee who carries a certain darkness within.

And finally, the young Pohu works his way under our skin as a kid who feels what so many of us felt at his age, summed up by a line Enzo shouts toward the end of the film — and that we all remember from Radiohead’s classic teen anthem, “Creep”: “I don’t belong here.”