Callan McAuliffe in Beneath the Harvest Sky (Tribeca Film)

As the brainchild of married couple Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly, Beneath the Harvest Sky successfully sidesteps sentimental clichés. What results instead is certainly tear jerking, but nonetheless a realistic portrayal of small town youth.

It depicts the day-to-day lives of two teenage friends wading through senior year in rural Maine. Casper (Emory Cohen) and Dominic (Callan McAuliffe) come from very disparate family situations, yet bond over their communal disdain for their hometown’s tedium. As best friends since childhood, they have long felt the weighty thumb of mediocrity smothering them. In their New England hamlet, there seems to be only two lines of work: potato harvesting or drug smuggling. Though Casper and Dominic share an impenetrable relationship, they do so as behavioral opposites. Dominic takes to the potato harvest, and Casper falls into the latter occupation.

Incidentally, Casper’s gig collecting prescription drugs around town—with or without the owner’s consent—happens to be the family business. His father, Clayton (Edward Norton look-alike Aidan Gillen), is the local drug lord, cooking up his own signature recipes of meth and god-knows-what. Clayton runs his product between Maine and Canada with the help of his brother Badger (Timm Sharp). It’s truly a family endeavor, and one that the film delicately suggests we look at from another angle. This isn’t to say that the screenplay romanticizes the DIY narcotics racket—far from it. However, given Casper’s alternatives in life, it sheds a humanizing light on a kid that everyone thinks is no good, when really his options have been limited beyond belief.

Casper’s other “home,” that of his mother’s, is somehow worse than the meth den his father occupies. She bears the marks of classic trailer trash: innumerable children, sleazy boyfriend, and a steady diet of cigarettes. She openly tells Casper she wants him out of her house. As a result of his discordant family life, Casper spends most of his time with Dominic in an abandoned home they have adopted as a sort of fort. They pass time there smoking weed, shooting things with a potato gun, and stashing the money they’ve both earned in hopes of buying a car and hightailing it to Boston.

Though Dominic seems to be a looser focal point than Casper, his character is thoroughly developed. He is the young man of promise: hardworking, sweet, and unshakably loyal to his friend despite outside attempts to dissuade him.

The film teeters on a narrow ledge; several plot points could have tipped it into melodramatic Lifetime territory. Instead, Gaudet and Pullapilly have written and directed a work that handles mundane yet dramatic subject matter with subtlety and humanity. There wasn’t a scrap of cringy, overwrought dialogue, nor any scenarios that came across as unrealistic.

I’m not sure how the directorial duo managed to capture such accurate portrayals of hickville Maine, but they absolutely nailed it. Every single person cast in this movie convinced me of their role, and if you’re from a small rust belt town, you’ve known all of the people in this movie: the babbling geriatric hermits, the pregnant teens, the meth heads, the farmers. The performances by the two leads were nothing less than on-point and understated.

My one criticism is the heavy reliance on music as an emotional cue. The score was a little too relentless, and some of the very moving and distressing scenes would have been so much more powerful without it. Then again, if this is the worst thing about the movie, I’d say the filmmakers still delivered a successful piece of work.