Benny (Keir Tallman) keeps his hair long, wears his mother’s hat, loves TV soap operas and Fleetwood Mac, and plays with dolls, though they are, technically speaking, action figurines. It makes his Uncle Marvin ask him—“Are you a cowboy or a cowgirl?” “I am just Benny!” comes his strong, staunch retort. Billy Luther’s Frybread Face and Me is about an adolescent’s assertion of himself. But, before that, it is about a journey to discovering who he truly is. Giving him company in this enforced self-searching is a cousin Frybread Face (Charley Hogan) with whom he bonds during the summertime he is forced to spend at his maternal grandmother Lorraine’s ranch in Arizona.

On the face of it, Frybread Face and Me might feel like any other coming-of-age film. But arriving at adulthood here is not individuated so much as placed in the broader context of the family’s history, what Benny chooses to inherit from it, and what he decides to leave behind. Learning about the family makes him take a deep dive into who he is and what he wants to be. Executive produced by Taika Waititi, the film played at SXSW and Toronto International Film Festival and will be dropping on Netflix soon.