My wife and I saw The First Time in the only theater in NYC that is showing it – the disgusting AMC Empire 25 in Times Square. The tiny, filthy theater assigned to this film was nearly empty. While there, we met (sitting next to us) the grandmother of Dylan O’Brien, the kid who plays the male lead in the film, and we had a brief chat with her expressing our mutual disbelief that this delightful little movie could not get better distribution or better reviews from critics.

The First Time opens with a 20-25 minute conversation between the two leads, O’Brien and Britt Robertson, who meet each other in an alley outside of a drunken party. When was the last time you saw anything like that in a movie about teenagers in high school? Jon Kasdan (who wrote and directed) clearly has an old-school attitude about dialog, and it carries throughout the entire movie, so much so that I think the film compares more naturally to something like Before Sunrise than anything in the teenybopper genera. They certainly share the same basic theme: the more or less continuous story of the initial hours of a relationship between two young people who meet by chance, explored almost entirely through dialog. Maybe this is part of the film’s distribution problem. After all, how many people saw Before Sunrise, or have even heard of it?!

Of course, now that this comparison is on the table, certain issues come to the fore. Before Sunrise didn’t just have lots of dialog, it had spectacularly entertaining dialog, presented in a succession of incredibly original and memorable scenes, and delivered by actors (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy) possessing astonishing warmth and charisma, and exhibiting fabulous chemistry together. It’s more than a bit unfair to compare The First Time to this masterpiece. Rather, I see The First Time as a transposition of the basic Before Sunrise formula to the world of generation Z high school experience, with a shift of emphasis from artistic flamboyance to emotional realism.

The result is a small, intimate, rather literal film. The dialog winds up being a slightly unstable mix of somewhat sophisticated ideas and the banal, semi-coherent stammering of average teenagers. This is not a bad thing, however; it feels very realistic, even charming at times. All character development, even the supporting characters (Robertson’s older boyfriend Ronny and O’Brien’s unrequited love interest Jane,) is done entirely through dialog. Since the characters are not very deep, neither is the dialog, but it is well-written. And it’s refreshing and unusual to see this approach taken within this genera, resulting in a film that is consistently interesting and which possesses a nice easy narrative rhythm.

The cast features a number of people that I already liked from small but exceptional recent films. The female lead, Britt Robertson, played Cara in Dan in Real Life, a film that I consider a modern classic. She is a good actress with a delightful presence and warmth on screen (she comes across like a combination of Juno Temple and Kay Pannebaker,) and she gives a very realistic and winning performance. Her co-lead Dylan O’Brien is a newcomer who is definitely channeling River Phoenix in Running on Empty for this role. His performance was perhaps a bit understated for my taste, but it was very earnest, and he and Robertson have a nice chemistry. James Frecheville (who starred in a little known favorite from a few years back called Animal Kingdom) is great playing the very interesting character of Robertson’s older boyfriend. And Dylan O’Brien’s confident, geeky friend Simon is played by Craig Roberts, who was the memorable lead in the fantastic little indie film Submarine; unfortunately, Roberts does not have much to do here, but it is still nice to see him.

When I reviewed Jon Kasdan’s first movie In the Land of Women, I pointed out that it was a pretty good film, but lamented that it possessed and squandered almost all the raw material it needed to be truly great, comparing it unfavorably with Eric Rohmer’s similarly-themed masterpiece Conte D’Été (1996.) In some ways, I think The First Time is a more artistically realized (if less ambitious) film than In the Land of Women. It has a more cohesive structure, it has better dialog and character development, and it is more disciplined and avoids the rather large mistakes its predecessor made. I don’t think it was ever in the cards for The First Time to be another Before Sunrise, however. Rather, it stands on its own as a very engaging and low-key film about teens falling in love.

I get the sense that most people will never have the chance to see The First Time in theaters, but be sure you Netflix it when it comes out. It was very unfairly snubbed, in my opinion.