Holly Deveaux, left, and Mark Rendall star in writer David Bezmozgis's debut feature film, Victoria Day. (Annabelle Reyes/E1 Films)

The film Victoria Day reaches backwards for its pop culture bearings. Though it’s set in late spring 1988, 16-year-old Ben Spektor moans about missing Woodstock and obsessively plays the obscure Bob Dylan song Dark Eyes.

David Bezmozgis, the film’s 36-year-old writer-director, takes this “inherited nostalgia” – his term – from his own North Toronto youth. He re-enacted Platoon in the very park where, on screen, Ben and his friends don face paint and play out jungle skirmishes from the Vietnam War, which occurred before they were born.

'I wanted to tell the story of what teenage life felt like as I remembered it. Some of the stories ended up being stories for the page, and this one I felt was cinematic and visual, because of the fireworks, and the hockey.'

— Author and first-time filmmaker David Bezmozgis

In a Toronto hotel room, Bezmozgis recalls, in his soft, unwaveringly even, almost lullaby voice, a youth beholden to boomer self-regard on TV (The Wonder Years), film (The Big Chill) and in music (classic rock radio, man).

“The baby boomers had reached middle age and were looking back on their youth and maybe idealizing it,” he says. “My feeling was that I’d missed out. The music then was better, culturally it was more interesting.”

But despite the colonization of his teen years, he won’t boomer-bash. “It’s not uncommon for a generation to idealize a time before. In the ’40s, people idealized the jazz age. And there’s not a lot of rock 'n' roll that’s better than what came out in the ’60s.”

Still, when a generation’s reference points are not their own, it can be dislocating. Bezmozgis is better known for writing about a more literal displacement: the immigrant Russian Jews who populate his book of short fiction, Natasha and Other Stories. Published in 2003 to critical accolades, the collection’s success positioned Bezmozgis, barely 30, as a literary wunderkind; he was even tagged the next Philip Roth.

But he was also an aspiring filmmaker. After graduating from the University of Southern California with an MFA in film production, Bezmozgis spent his early twenties working in documentaries, as well as stringing for Canadian cable networks like Book TV and Sex TV. “Anything they wanted shot around L.A. or Nevada, my friend and I were the guys,” he says. “We would go to an antiquarian bookstore one day and the next day to a warehouse where a father and son had created a synthetic vagina.”

David Bezmozgis, director of Victoria Day. (Annabelle Reyes/E1 Films)

At night — perhaps to recover — Bezmozgis would work on the Victoria Day script and hone his short stories. With a speed that left other aspiring writers standing stunned with their hair blown back, Bezmozgis landed an agent who sold the Natasha collection to Farrar, Strauss. In one month in 2003, Bezmozgis's short stories appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Harper’s and The New Yorker. His book made the short lists for the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth First Book Prize. But when he’s asked to recall what it feels like to be pulled into such unprecedented success, Bezmozgis maintains his unflappable understatement.

“It’s what all aspiring writers dream of and you think it will never happen. The odds are so astronomically against you, and you kind of can’t believe it’s your life,” he says quietly. “Then it passes and you have to pay your mortgage and take out your garbage.”

Reading the book and seeing the film, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Both feature young male protagonists stumbling toward the finish line of their adolescence. Each boy has a Russian father who is a massage therapist, and film and book are both set in the flat suburban landscape of North Toronto that Bezmozgis first encountered at age six, when his family emigrated from Latvia, part of an exodus of Soviet Jews.

“I wanted to tell the story of what teenage life felt like as I remembered it. I wanted to write about this community, and some of the stories ended up being stories for the page, and this one I felt was cinematic and visual because of the fireworks, and the hockey,” he says. And aural, too: while writing, Bezmozgis often blasted Neil Young’s Pocahontas. (“The electric version from Rust Never Sleeps,” he clarifies, with a music geek’s specificity.)

Canadian producers had already optioned the script in 2002, before Bezmozgis's literary ascension. While he took time out to establish himself as an author, he says he always knew he would return to Toronto to make Victoria Day. “I wanted to live in a place where there was a chance I could get a movie like this made. It could never have happened in L.A. It’s just too small by their standards.”

Bezmozgis was invited to the Sundance film festival to workshop the screenplay. Reworking the script, he took inspiration from other poignant, respectful coming-of-age films, like The Squid and The Whale; the Nicolas Cage-Sean Penn period film Racing with the Moon and Dazed and Confused.

Mark Rendall, centre, plays a teenager in 1980s Toronto in Victoria Day. (Annabelle Reyes/E1 Films)

The hero of Victoria Day is Ben, a good kid who fixates on the sister of a missing boy. The film has the muted, imagistic feeling of Bezmozgis’s short stories. At a hockey practice, players go round and round the ice; they’re seen from afar, and look like a swarm of insects. That endless circling is a nice metaphor for adolescence, the relentless wait for the adult future. But in the meantime, Ben must survive his goofball friends and the fumblings of adolescent sex.

Bezmozgis cast mostly non-professionals, and the result is that rare teen film populated by normal-looking kids replete with terrible ’80s jeans and unflattering hair. Young audiences schooled on Gossip Girl and The Hills are accustomed to more manufactured teen stars – with credit cards. But Bezmozgis has been touring Toronto high schools with the film and he sees an audience hungry for something relatable.

“The response by a teenage audience is a lot of laughter of recognition. They see themselves and their own foibles. They recognize awkward situations. It’s important for me that teenagers get to see this film, because so many teen films sell them short. I’m not sure why, but the people who make teen films think teens are stupid.”

Bezmozgis claims he had a good time in high school — an admission that violates the rule that all successful artists were tormented teens. (He does confess to a few “minor humiliations” which he declines to detail.) His friends from that time are his friends now. He still listens to ’60s music.

“By the time you’re 16, you are who you are. Adults have calcified. They’ve made some choices, now they have to defend those choices. Kids haven’t made those choices yet,” says the boy wonder, sounding a little nostalgic for nostalgia.

Victoria Day opens on June 19 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.