There is a milky light that drenches much of Gus Van Sant’s macabre adolescent love story, Restless, which gives the film a crisp, wintery feeling — the kind of chilly stillness that is ripe for cigarettes, warm coffee, soup, and the dreamy music-scapes of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. The mood fits Van Sant’s story, which at least get’s this right: making a movie about adolescence is the same thing as making a moving about feeling. Restless is full of feelings — sweet ones, strained ones, pangs and pains. It is a fluttering, vulnerable thing, whose own sensibilities are bound up in the nascent emotional sensibilities of its characters. Which is to say, Restless is unabashedly adolescent, like it is trying to tell a story of youthful experience from the inside out.

Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper) is an adolescent insider cut from the mold of Maude’s Harold. His bubbling, Holden Caulfield angst manifests itself in tiny, one-man demonstrations: crashing the funerals of children and teenagers. He is a torn, paralytic sort, reminiscent of the tongue-tied protagonist sitting and staring in the room downstairs in The Smiths’ “Girl Afraid.” His closest friend is an imaginary one, the “ghost” Hiroshi Takahashi (Ryo Kase). Hiroshi is a young kamikaze pilot who drove his plane into a U.S. ship as the sun set on World War II. Now he has somehow wound up with the postmortem companionship of the young wanderer, Enoch, who suffers his own death-pangs: his parents died in a car accident, leaving the boy an orphan living with his aunt. Fitting with the smirking, upturned black humor that leavens much of Restless, Hiroshi and Enoch pass the time by playing the board game Battleship.

Enoch’s dreamy day-to-days are broken up when he first notices the adorable and un-ignorable Annabel Cotton (Mia Wasikowska), who is all of a sudden at more than one of the funerals Enoch crashes. That is enough to set any teenage outcast’s heart aflutter, but when a funeral director corners Enoch and accuses him of crashing the funerals, and Annabel swoops in to save him with a cleverly acted lie, the attraction becomes magnetic. Annabel proves a rascal, bright, clever and full of worldly wonder. She is an amateur naturalist, burying herself in Charles Darwin and scientific volumes about obscure birds and insects. These days, unfortunately, tossing Darwin into a movie about death can’t help but send off buzzers warning of the encroachment of polemics. But Van Sant is too talented a director to let this, or any of Restless’s atheistic-leaning metaphors terminate in any political score boarding. Annabel is in love with world, and like Gerard Manley Hopkins, she finds its beauty in dappled things.

The naturalist and the dreamer are a good fit; they prove a kind of idealist vision of Edenic teenage bliss. Much of the appeal of the relationship is driven by Wasikowska’s infectious charm. Wasikowska is such an adorable, sprite-like actress, perfectly cast as a new generation’s loner dream girl. While Annabel Cotton is not as far-flung and ambitious a role as Wasikowska’s previous one, as Jane Eyre, she nonetheless needs to take her character down a delicate, melodramatic decent. We discover that the reason Annabel is showing up at Enoch’s funerals is not because she is a volunteer at a children’s cancer hospital, as she initial tells him, but because she herself has cancer. It is the realist of real world problems that, to Restless’s detriment, feels less important for the mediations on death it provokes than the inevitable period it places on budding teenage romance. Losing your first love can feel like death to the heart of a 16-year-old. For poor Enoch, lost love and death just happen to be one and the same.

Restless’s shortcomings are bound up in the pact Van Sant makes with his own content, insisting on limiting the film’s emotional scope to the emotional world of its characters. It is a touching, often moving little film that is as identifiable as it is slight, which probably speaks to our own pop-educated emotional selves. It is a film with singular intent, to produce the same kind of melancholic catharsis that accompanies rehearing the song that once played during our first kiss. Ah, time and loss: how can some pain prove so sweet?