From left, Hattie Hook, Thom Green, and Elias Anton in Of an Age (Ben King/Focus Features)

It’s hard to believe that Of an Age, a modest, occasionally moving coming-of-age tale of a transient gay relationship in 1999, is from the same director as last year’s 19th-century Macedonian shapeshifting witch fable You Won’t Be Alone. Though writer/director Goran Stolevski reveals a distinctive voice in both features and takes risks, his work so far doesn’t entirely coalesce satisfactorily.

After a mysterious, brief prelude, Of an Age begins rockily, with teenaged Ebony (Hattie Hook) waking on a beach, disoriented. She stumbles to a pay phone and urgently calls Kol (Elias Anton), a lanky Serbian immigrant who is also Ebony’s friend and ballroom dance partner. Their final contest is in an hour, and it seems impossible for Kol and Ebony to make it in time. Both Anton and Hook shout and shake and act at amped-up levels (past 10) in this intro that I worriedly wondered while watching: Can the movie really sustain this? The urgency doesn’t feel quite right, and the comedy, if it’s supposed to be comic, feels too strained, even if we are watching the antics of theater kids.

Fortunately, the tempo slows and settles into a more bearable and realistic rhythm once Kol hitches a ride with Ebony’s older brother Adam (Thom Green) to the competition. Kol and Adam have never met, and both are gay. Kol is closeted, with flickers of internalized homophobia, while Adam is out and more confident, inquisitive, and quietly alluring. While venturing to find Ebony, the two converse, listening to Adam’s somewhat esoteric mix tapes he shared with his ex, including the soundtrack for Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together. They talk of books, writers like Borges and Kafka, and of their lives—as much as Kol can reveal without coming out—as the bland industrial buildings of North Melbourne pass under grayish sunlight.

They eventually find the rattled Ebony, and as the analog clock in Adam’s wagon ticks by, the eroticism between Adam and Kol continues to build slowly throughout the day and into the night and the sodium light-lit early morning hours. Ultimately, they end up finding a time and place for a tryst. Like many cinematic gay yarns of the somewhat recent past, notably Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, someone eventually has to depart. (Adam, showing his leg up in both age and sophistication over Kol, is Buenos Aires–bound to start a PhD program.)

Then the film jumps forward as the jetlagged duo are reunited for the first time in a decade at Ebony’s wedding. In this final act, the film is at its strongest, depicting a fretful and regretful pair wedged into a rather bland marriage ceremony. When a drunk Kol leads Ebony into a ballroom dance routine of Nelly Furtado’s club thumper “Maneater,” it’s both amusing and a tinge sad. Ebony, the skittish, former theater kid, rejected from Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, has changed into a more modified existence: Hook’s performance here becomes incredibly bittersweet. Regarding Adam, there’s a built-up resentment and acidity in the now-buff Kol. Even if his and Adam’s moment in time could seem quick and inconsequential, the film reveals its importance to its troubled characters.

As in Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone, atmosphere is key to the mood and wistfulness here, even when the story stretches a sense of credulity. Cinematographer Matthew Chuang’s images display a grainy beauty to the languid doldrums of the settings (the car, a mall, a house party) and enhances the film beautifully. The shots of Ebony waking on the lonely strand of beach—the sun over crashing waves—are wonderfully composed.

The sound design too helps elevate the material. There are varied sonic shifts—from a blaring football game on TV to metal music scintillating a dour party—that add texture. Music supervisor Andrew Kotatko’s striking and eclectic choices aren’t brimming with on-the-nose ’90s hits, but with music the characters would likely be listening to: Tori Amos B-sides or Live’s “Lightning Crashes” playing somewhere in the background. Creating a dissonance between cheery pastiche and the dreariness of real life, the pop songs at the wedding all have lyrics that could pertain to Kol and Adam (Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker,” Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy is Mine,” Amerie’s “1 Thing”).

Like its soundtrack, there’s a wavering inconsistency in the tone and quality in Of an Age, but there is also a specificity and soulfulness to it that’s special.