Fatih Akin, a German director of Turkish descent, has been making closely observed dramas about outsiders and immigrants since his 2004 film Head-On won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear award. His latest—based on the childhood of his co-writer Hark Bohm—follows 12-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), whose unseen father is a high-ranking SS officer away at war. His pregnant mother, Hilla (Laura Tonke), also a rabid Nazi, brings Nanning and his younger brother to live with their somber Aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister) on Amrum, an island in the North Sea, to escape the Allied bombings of their hometown of Hamburg. (Bohm, a legendary figure in German cinema who starred in several films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, died last year.)

Nanning is an outsider because he is a “mainlander,” the derisive term other youngsters on the island use to mock him. Although he is a member of the local Hitler Youth, he is a shy, sensitive, smart kid trying to grasp the subtleties of life during a war that is happening somewhere else, both militarily and politically. He wants to remain a true believer like his parents, but seeing the contradictions in front of his eyes starts giving him pause—like the neighboring potato farmer Tessa (an always forceful Diane Kruger), who loudly proclaims her dislike of the Nazis in front of a uniformed Nanning.

After his mother gives birth—in a memorably bizarre scene where the announcement of Hitler’s death on the radio causes her to weep so uncontrollably that she goes into labor—she becomes more physically and emotionally unstable. Nanning scrounges the island for food he knows she loves in a desperate attempt to make her happy, and he runs into other islanders, some of whom are standoffish or hostile and others who are friendly and helpful. When refugees from Soviet-held territories are crossing on foot through the area, he and other locals stare at the ragtag group while one asks, “Can they speak German?” The man shepherding the refugees responds matter-of-factly, “They are German.”

Akin and Bohm’s script drops bits of unwelcome truths for Nanning to learn about his family, as in a scene out on a boat with a local fisherman, Sam (Detlev Buck), who relays that Nanning’s Uncle Theo (Matthias Schweighöfer), who is now living in America, was exiled by the Nazis for becoming engaged to a Jewish woman whom the Nazis later murdered in a concentration camp. Later, Nanning has a dream that Theo has returned to the island. While they walk on the beach, his uncle admonishes him with the startling statement, “You are not to blame, but you are still involved.”

That Nanning’s wide-eyed innocence gives way to a fitful understanding of the perils of nationalism is something Akin and his inventive cinematographer, Karl Walter Lindenlaub, visually underscore with luminous compositions belying the violence and death that permeate the film, which was shot on location. A spectacular example is the ravishing nocturnal image of Nanning walking along the beach under the light of a full moon—which reflects gorgeously off the water—when he finds the bloated corpse of an air force pilot, its eye sockets empty because of some ravenous animal.

Jasper Billerbeck makes Nanning one of the most memorably multidimensional young wartime protagonists since The Tin Drum and Empire of the Sun. Only the brief appearance of the elderly Bohm himself seems a bit of a sentimental anticlimax in this otherwise acute and restrained character study.