Gay, straight, mainstream or otherwise, the new film Wild Tigers I Have Known — a coming-of-age tale of sorts about a teenage boy grappling with his sexuality — is not typical movie fare. It is more like a feature-length hybrid of experimental art film and music video; viewers should not expect much plot or character development in the normal sense. Many of the film's characters are underwritten, perhaps purposely, and as a result, it is difficult to grasp who the film's characters really are and why they are motivated to do what they do on-screen.

Written, directed and produced by Cam Archer in his feature-length debut, Wild Tigers first premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography. Its executive producers include Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho) and Scott Rudin (Notes on a Scandal, The Queen), and last month it was released in New York and will slowly be opening in additional cities nationwide.

Archer created Wild Tigers while at the Sundance Institute's Screenwriters Lab in 2005. At the time he was only 23 years old, the youngest participant the lab's history. Prior to Wild Tigers he made the gay-themed short films Godly Boyish (2004), American Fame Pt. 1: Drowning River Phoenix (2004) and Bobbycrush (2003).

In Wild Tigers, teen actor Malcolm Stumpf (The Next Best Thing) plays Logan, a sensitive, small-town adolescent striving to come to terms with his budding homosexuality. Logan suffers from anti-gay bullying and hazing from other students at his junior high school, and though his friendly, supportive school counselor (Kim Dickens) tries to help him, he retreats from the issue.

His struggling, single, working mom, played by Fairuza Balk (American History X, The Craft), also does her best to reach out to him, but Logan distances himself from her.

Lonely and delusional, Logan develops an unrealistic infatuation with an older, more mature schoolmate: the strong, silent, hip outsider, Rodeo (Patrick White). Part of Rodeo's allure is that he happens to be one of the few students who befriends Logan.

Nervous about being perceived as gay by Rodeo and others, Logan creates a transgender alter ego for himself named Leah. Posing as Leah, he feminizes his speaking voice and initiates flirtatious phone calls to Rodeo. He acquires a wig, makeup and feminine clothes, and in this ruse he sets up a sexual tryst with the unsuspecting Rodeo. If they meet at night out in the dark woods, Logan fantasizes, perhaps he can pull it off.

While denying he is gay, Logan confides both his homosexual feelings and his cross-dressing tendencies to his sexually ambivalent, nebbish buddy Joey (Max Paradise). Joey functions as a kind of one-man Greek chorus in Wild Tigers, telling Logan, "If you want to have sex with another guy, you are gay."

The film contains an additional, dark subplot. Logan's school and town border on a forest wilderness, and a dangerous, killer mountain lion — a metaphor for Logan's own sexual awakening — has been seen lurking about the school property. The same forest that hides the mountain lion hides Logan and Rodeo's rendezvous location.

Artistically speaking, the most striking feature of Wild Tigers is its pervasive sense of existential emptiness. Interspersed between many of its dramatic scenes, Archer offers dreamlike shots of nature — open sky, seashores, forests, caves, tunnels, the darkness of night outdoors — as well as empty school hallways and schoolyards, unused roads and train tracks.

The film's interesting score by Nate Archer — featuring bells, wind chimes, rushing air sounds, low drones and a host of bird, frog and insect calls — also conjures up empty space. One is reminded of the nothingness conveyed so well by the many airy, wind-filled scenes in the equally dream- and desire-ridden 1947 film Black Narcissus.

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