Dandelion (2004)

Any movie that starts with a teenage boy placing a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger means business. Dandelion (2004) is a searing, truthful, and responsible investigation of the solitary heart of lonely adolescence. What are a sensitive kid’s chances for growing into young-adult happiness when he has been born into a fractured family of deliberate depressives? Well, those odds become appreciably longer when this stultifying home life is located in a dismal, distant, dying town where the only good thing that ever happened was the arrival of a girl, a girl the same age as the dismayed kid, a girl whose chest swells with the same emotions and wonder as does his. In a better world, this boy and girl would be destined to live happily ever after.