Gunshots, screeching tires, barking dogs, police sirens: noises that are often indicative of imminent peril are as commonplace in Venezuelan writer/director Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair as a running faucet or a cooing baby. Those innocuous sounds are heard as well, along with thumping basketballs, humming TV sets, scratching vinyl, and whirring blow driers. All of these sights and sounds—an amalgamation of menace and the mundane—are surveyed and processed by nine-year-old Junior (a remarkable Samuel Lange), a boy with curly “bad hair” who simply wants to look nice by straightening his locks for the school portrait.

Rondón depicts the sprawling city of Caracas like the sullied aftermath of a failed urban experiment. Filled with measureless Le Corbusier-inspired 1950s architecture—multifamily high rises once designed for a modern utopian metropolis—the Venezuelan capital is rendered a seedy, cement-y convolution of unmet expectations. In one of the block towers within the city’s slum belt lives Marta (Samantha Castillo), an unemployed widower and mother of two, whose oldest son, Junior, defies her own fixed expectations of what a young boy should do and be.

His “bad hair” differs notably from that of his Latina mother and adored baby brother. Junior mostly takes after his late father—who was black. Rather than playing soccer with the neighbors, the boy fixates in front of the bathroom mirror, his only concern being the state of his curls. He spends his days with the chubby girl next door (María Emilia Sulbarán) planning their outfits and hairstyles for the pivotal yearbook photograph. By straightening his hair, Junior aims to emulate a fashionable male pop singer, but beneath this surface desire, all he really wants is to earn his mother’s love.

Marta, though, sidesteps affection in the name of day-to-day survival. She doesn’t want her son to end up like her late husband, a doting father murdered through gang violence. But even more unsettling to her is the idea that Junior could grow up to become someone much more perilous, a gay man. Instead of trusting Junior’s dreamy, harmless intentions, she spoils his innocence by teaching him cruel lessons about the world around them. By detaching her maternal duties and scorning his playfulness, Marta only succeeds in crushing the boy’s nimble spirit.

The staggering dichotomy of instability and potential strikes a powerful undertone in the director’s depiction of contemporary Caracas, observed through the perspective of an unconventional young boy. Buoyed by two tremendous performances and the Venezuelan helmer’s assured direction, Bad Hair is a consummate, captivating coming-of-age narrative, hemmed by a wide-eyed journey of presexual queer awakening. Unlike the clamor of shootings and sirens, Rondón understands that for Junior, the most terrifying sound is when there is no sound at all—the silence of his mother’s rejection.