By Stephanie Buckley

Showtimes:

• Thursday, March 5, 11:15 a.m.–1:00 p.m. at Flagship Theater #5 (followed by filmmaker Q&A)
• Saturday, March 7, 2:30 p.m.–4:15 p.m at the Princess Royale (followed by filmmaker Q&A)

When I was fourteen, my parents were going through a difficult divorce (though unlike the parents of Piece of the Wall’s protagonist, Dustin, they lived only 10 minutes from each other in Camden-Wyoming, Delaware), and I was falling in love with movies.

I stumbled upon IFC by accident on a snowy afternoon in early 2010, and every day after school, I watched quiet, odd movies — 12 and Holding, Wristcutters, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape — that satisfied something I didn’t know I’d been craving. I wanted movies that reflected real life and lingered in mundane moments. “What you’re feeling is important,” these movies seemed to say to me. I started filming things with a cheap digital camera — images that were interesting to me, things I thought I might cut together one day but never did: the rotations of ceiling fans, the view from the passenger’s seat of my mom’s car, an empty, windy beach on a cold spring day.

All of this is to say that Piece of the Wall was transporting for me. The film follows 14-year-old Dustin as he shuttles back and forth between his home in New York City, where he lives with his club owner father, and Fenwick Island, Delaware, where his mom has settled with her young surfer boyfriend, “Monk.” The film’s raw, home-movie aesthetic gives the viewer an intimate, fly-on-the-wall view of quiet family moments and everyday dinner table conversations.

I wasn’t surprised to find out that the actors in the film are actually family — Dustin’s mom Gretchen is portrayed by writer-director Charlotte Wincott, while Dustin and his father Ray are played by her real-life son, Wolfgang, and husband, Jeff. Though the family they portray on-screen is fractured and spread out across state lines, their interactions feel lived in and real.

The viewer follows Dustin through the small moments that accompany his transition into adulthood. As his parents share a bit too much about the problematic story of their meeting, how Gretchen nearly committed suicide, how Ray is still not over Gretchen, he learns, as we all do, to see his parents as real people with desires and motivations beyond their children.

Ultimately, Piece of the Wall is an exploration of the transiency of adolescence. Dustin is constantly in motion but seemingly going nowhere. This is well-represented by Monk, Gretchen’s much younger boyfriend, who Dustin sees more as a brother than a stepdad. Monk is ostensibly an adult, though he spends his time surfing and hanging out with Dustin, engaged in childlike activities like blowing bubbles and playing with squirt guns. He’s not quite a man, but not quite a child.

When Ray takes Dustin on a “postmodern culture tour of New York,” with stops at the iconic Chelsea Hotel and the old haunts of artists like Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, and Janis Joplin, he reflects on his own memory. As he’s gotten older, it’s become easier to look back on his life with a “bird’s eye view.” The film offers a counterpoint in Dustin’s point of view. The camera lingers on the silences between words, long bus rides, and moments of solitude. Piece of the Wall perfectly encapsulates the way we experience time and memories as teenagers. There’s a feeling of waiting, being beholden to the wills of other people, being trapped.

The film’s title refers to a painted piece of the Berlin wall that’s now in Battery Park City. In the opening voiceover narration, Dustin says of the wall, “people aren’t meant to be divided like that.” Throughout Piece of the Wall, Dustin experiences the constant whiplash between life in New York City and in Fenwick Island, and bears the weight of assumptions about people in both places. New Yorkers think Fenwick Island is nowhere, boring, empty. Fenwick Islanders think New York is stressful, vapid, devoid of nature and peace. Ultimately, none of these assumptions are altogether true.

There’s so much to chew on in this film already that one can almost forget its more surrealist elements — namely, the lady in medieval clothing that Dustin begins seeing around New York City, who may or may not be real. I wasn’t sure exactly what to make of the lady. Her presence onscreen manifests as a quiet daunting feeling, a specter of the broader “past,” not unlike the past New York City glory days Dustin’s dad constantly evokes. But the lady might also be a manifestation of Dustin’s depression — a quiet, unnamable presence following him around town.

Ultimately, Piece of the Wall is a look into the everyday lives of these characters, who the actors embody effortlessly. The awkward parts of their interactions — the silences, the ums and ahs, the mistakes — don’t get cut out; they’re part of the point. Piece of the Wall is a must see for mumblecore fans and anyone who’s interested in watching complicated family dynamics unfold onscreen.