In the newest film from writer-director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), imagination and intellect are the formative hallmarks of youth and young manhood.
Microbe and Gasoline focuses on Daniel Guéret (Ange Dargent, in his first acting role), a young teen given the grade school nickname “Microbe” for his stunted growth, and transfer student Théo (Théophile Baquet), whose gearhead predilection earned him the moniker “Gasoline.”
The pair, one full of shame and inhibition and the other boisterous and confident, are bound by their mutual nonconformity and become tight friends. After Théo gets hold of a motor, the two become amateur junkyard scrappers and engineer a vehicle to hit the road that summer. The end product is an rickety cottage on wheels that scuttles through the French countryside.
Gondry’s creative impulses, while immaculately envisioned, can overshadow story. In the past, he’s turned The White Stripes into Lego figurines (the “Fell In Love With a Girl” music video), created a morning talk show set with walls lined with eggshell cartons (The Science of Sleep), and hand-drew a 90-minute animation for a conversation he had with Noam Chomsky (Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?) But this isn’t the case with Microbe, since there’s a stark absence of computer graphics or outstanding visual effects. The emphasis isn’t so much on the idiosyncrasies of Daniel and Théo’s world (of which there are plenty), but the genuine friendship that befalls the characters. Still, the movie is effortlessly sharp.
It’s full of countless moments that are quietly hilarious: Théo, whose age deters him from a driver’s license, outfits his fixie bike with a speaker to make it sound like it runs on a gas-powered motor; Daniel, an aspiring artist, hosts a gallery exhibition of drawings of his brother’s punk-rock friends. When no one shows up, Théo arrives and comments, “What a success!” He sidesteps through the empty gallery, pretends to introduce himself to other attendees, including heads of state and naval officials.

Gondry has a sincere love and a sense of humor for his characters. He situates you inside a 14-year-old’s worldview; stakes seem dauntingly high, but whenever they fall into a gutter, they always bounce higher.
In lesser hands, the story in Microbe could have fallen ill to ham-fisted schmaltz and excessive sentimentality. But this is an unexpectedly straightforward movie from Gondry. It’s a solid buddy movie and a great road movie. As one Bijou employee put it: “This is Y Tu Mamá También for kids.”
Microbe and Gasoline, which is in French with English subtitles, is, confusingly, rated R. It’s playing at the Bijou Art Cinemas (492 East 13^th Ave).