The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet will most likely not be properly appreciated by the audiences and critics of its time. This is a movie that’s destined for future glory. Maybe two or so decades from now, it will be recognized as one of the most curious, most original, most profound examinations not so much of Americana but of Americanization, which is what globalization, in its cultural form, amounts to. It is also the most bizarrely wonderful American English–speaking film by a European director since Arizona Dream, a 1993 dramedy by Emir Kusturica (Underground).

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie, The City of Lost Children), Spivet concerns a boy genius, T.S. (Kyle Catlett), who is raised by an eccentric mother (Helena Bonham Carter) and cowboy father (Callum Keith Rennie) on a Montana ranch. He has a plain sister (Niamh Wilson) and a weird dog. One day, the accidental discharge of a gun sends his younger brother (Jakov Davies) to the grave. T.S. had a part in this accident, which no one in his family wants to talk about. The boy’s feeling of guilt deepens and deepens until he finally snaps and runs away from home. He is only 10.

During this journey, which occupies a third of the film, T.S. runs into a lot of creepy old men: creepy hobo, creepy cop, creepy truck driver. The world of his brilliant and scientific imagination (I’m taking a trip to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, to present my new and fabulous perpetual motion machine to specialists) cannot hide glimpses of the real world of sexual predators and the dangers of train hopping.

The America we see in the film, however, is mostly unreal, and not in a bad way. Clearly, Jeunet was not trying to produce anything close to a mirror of America but wanted a weird imitation of it—the America in the heads of those who are not American. One way he enhanced the feel of this un-American Americaness was by almost exclusively using non-Americans in the lead roles. I also understand much of Spivet was shot outside of the US. The result of this unforgiving artificializing of a culture that’s pretty artificial to begin with is what the future will recognize as one of Jeunet’s masterpieces.