“Most people think of themselves as individuals; that’s there no one else on the planet like them. This thought motivates them to get out of bed, eat food, and walk around like nothing’s wrong. My name is Oliver Tate”.

Submarine is as much about losing one’s virginity as Juno was giving birth. That film saw pregnancy as the foundation for more fertile conflict, and this uses sex as the impetus to explore existential teenage angst in a world of impending divorce. 15-year-old Oliver, buttoned-up coat and just-so scruffiness, is as taken with sex as any teenage boy doing without. Not just by his, but that of warring parents Lloyd and Jill, whom he observes with detached curiosity, documenting whether their bedroom light was last set to dimmed (good) or full brightness (bad).

School comes as easy to him as you’d imagine. He idles with thoughts of his untimely demise, envisioning classmates’ tear-stricken eulogies relayed in the wavering voice of the school principal. And then there’s this girl. Her name is Jordana, even if she doesn’t look much like a Jordana. Oliver courts her from afar, awkwardly, as though beholden to the kind of self-involved moments that have made ‘Wes Anderson’ a verb. His eyes emerge from behind a small notepad to look out at his paramour and her cruel schoolyard ritual. “Essentially, I disapprove of bullying” he concludes, before placing imaginary chalk on imaginary blackboard. “I must not let my principles stand in the way of progress”.

Oliver isn’t sure he believes in scenery. He’s one of those teenagers, like Juno, who don’t really exist anywhere but on the screen: too knowing even for a particularly erudite pocket philosopher, let alone a 15-year-old kid from deepest, darkest Wales. Yet he’s a joy to be around. After all, this is an unheroic hero who speaks in grand gestures while others retreat behind cool indifference. On the evening he and Jordana plan to have sex for the first time, he badly misjudges the mood but hands her his post-virginity declaration anyway. It’s the kind of letter, innocent and sweet, that you like to think you’d have written if youth and opportunity had so serendipitously collided.

Teen comedies tend to explore the adolescent world through an airbrushed facade of raunchy calamity. Submarine deals instead with cancer and the quiet collapse of home. With typical clarity of thought, Oliver takes stock. “Things were a lot less fun since Jordana’s mother might die and my parents marriage started falling apart. I’ve been working on strategies to solve both problems”. With modest triumph, he recalls having bought his Dad some new aftershave, before conceding “I’m drawing a blank on the cancer situation”.

I dislike that particularly loathsome phrase ‘quintessentially British’, but it rings true for Submarine; a film that imbibes the values of grey skies, thick accents and sour dispositions. It has that slightly misty feel I most readily associate with The Wonder Years, in which nostalgia hangs heavy, but in the best kind of way. It is never maudlin, nor does it succumb to the strange darkness of a Harold and Maude. Instead, it eloquently recounts those Polaroid moments of youth you’ll recognise whether you had them or not. It captures a quite profound sense of longing, both for new love and the sancturary of home. Fearing his mother is about to embark on an affair, Oliver abandons his grieving girlfriend to sit with his father over soup and water. Little is said. Oliver knows he should be somewhere else, just as his Dad recognises that marriages only fall further into quiet disrepair with every such sorry occasion. What more needs to be said?

Throughout, there are calls to Holden Caulfield and a host of great teenage thinkers, along with homages to Anderson and Goddard. Yet Submarine remains a determined and individual work. Richard Ayoade’s script is a deeply perceptive and idealistic one, given heartbreaking qualities by the melancholy of Alex Turner’s bittersweet soundtrack. Craig Roberts is an astonishing discovery, as is Yasmin Paige. Rare is the film fortunate enough to find two such perfect leads, rarer still the one that partners them with Sally Hawkins and the effortlessly encumbered Noah Taylor. I look to these warm, deeply human characters, and I don’t think I’d change a thing. Alive and vital, Submarine makes for kinetic filmmaking so life affirming that I wanted to watch it again almost immediately.

Ayoade will go on to make great films, but he’ll never make Submarine again – the moment is already passing, and soon it will be gone. It is, in truth, the last vestige of an innocence that can’t possibly last.