“Lean On Pete” is about a teenager who’s drifting through life with almost no direction from adults. A superb thing about the film is that it avoids every stereotype about teens you’ve seen in movies for far longer than you care to remember.

In fact, “Lean On Pete” would make a great double feature – if they still had such pleasures of cinema-going – with “Love, Simon,” the recent romantic comedy with a difference in which the teenagers feel as real as your own children.

The mother of Charley (Charlie Plummer) abandoned their home one day, a cold disappearing act that’s still a harsh knife in the boy’s heart. Charley lives with his father Ray (Travis Fimmel) in a messy house. They move a lot. They now reside on the dreary outskirts of Portland, Oregon, an area hipsters and tourists ignore. Dad’s the kind of guy who drinks beer and nuzzles married women. He then asks his son if he wants to do the same.

Fifteen-year-old Charley is clearly raising himself. He eats cereal with water and hopes his father can buy some groceries.

The boy’s outlook on life takes a positive turn when he encounters Del, a horse trainer, and a snarly grumpy fellow with a jaundiced view of life. He’s acted with grand sarcasm by Steve Buscemi. Del owns a quarter horse named Lean On Pete, which he still races in out-of-the-way tracks where winning a few bucks keeps pipe dreams alive.

Lean On Pete will soon be on its last legs, but he can still run and Charley is offered a job tending to the horse at the local stables and talking it for walks. This simple act of kindness from a middle-aged grump changes Charley’s life. Del’s biggest complaint? He doesn’t like the way the kid shovels food into his mouth. Buscemi’s way with advice is deliciously sarcastic.

Charley now has a little cash, and develops a special bond with the horse. The animal’s jockey, Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny), advises him not to care too much. At some point, Del will absolutely ship Lean On Pete to Mexico, where a glue factory awaits.

A family crisis turns deadly and news that the horse will soon be shipped away sends Charley into a tailspin. He steals the horse, hoping to take it to a fondly-remembered aunt in Wyoming. He’s never felt more alone.

It’s here that you shouldn’t know anything else about the movie, which is beautifully written and directed by Andrew Haigh of Great Britain. Haigh takes Willy Vlautin’s novel and turns it into heartbreaking gold. He boldly delivers a new American West of lost dreams and missed opportunities.

Plummer is extraordinary as Charley. His emotional pain is palpable. The boy’s journey across the scrub-laced high desert with “his” horse is lightning in a bottle. They do “make movies like they used to.” Here it is.

“Love After Love”: This is the directorial debut of Russell Harbaugh, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Mendelsohn. Harbaugh’s background is as interesting as his movie is unflinchingly powerful.

He was an All-American quarterback in the early 2000s at Wabash College and hoped to further his studies in filmmaking in New York City. What Harbaugh found was a ten-year struggle to succeed as a director, a period that included the cliched waiting on tables, as well as a series of film production and screenwriting workshops at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute.

Harbaugh’s movie is an emotional and spiritual thunderbolt. Watching it is like observing a family collecting fragments of their lives and pasting these moments in a scrapbook that is a journey of memories both joyful and tragic.

“Love After Love” is about how grief is handled. Harbaugh has drawn from his own experiences, which is rule number one if you want to be a director of “personal” movies. Find your creativity in what you know.

At first, the well-written film seems as if will be an examination of mourning. However, it delves much deeper. It also approaches its material in a way that figuratively places the audience in the corners of rooms, eavesdropping as lives unravel.

At the center of the story is a beloved husband who dies painfully from a terminal illness, a slow death march that exhausts his loved ones: his wife Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) and their two adult sons, Nicholas (Chris O’Dowd) and Christopher (James Adomian). This husband and father was a special man. The rock of the family.

Harbaugh surprises us by avoiding maudlin tears. He has a different concept of sadness. Suzanne, Nicholas, and Christopher all turn inward and act out personality and character traits that have been long-buried inside their psyches.

Suzanne weaves in and out of new relationships. This shocks her. Nicholas abruptly alters a sexual friendship in his life. Christopher finds solace by drinking and acting out bizarre behavior because of the alcohol. There are moments that are hilarious and also hideous. There is ugliness and bewilderment. Self-loathing burrows in.

Harbaugh makes you wonder if this family trio truly understood what kind of people they were. Did they ever actually know themselves? The cracks in their once-perfect world become chasms.

Well-acted by all, and beautifully photographed by Chris Teague, “Love After Love” is a breathtakingly good debut from a director to watch. He never once fails his audience.

• Michael Calleri has been reviewing movies professionally since 1990 and in his lifetime has seen more than 10,000 films in theaters and through other sources. If he had to choose the films of one director with which to relax, they would be Alfred Hitchcock’s. He can be reached at moviecolumn@gmail.com