Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

A film set in El Paso in 1987. Ari is fifteen and spends the summer alone. His brother is in prison and nobody at home will say why; his father came back from Vietnam and does not talk. At the swimming pool a boy offers to teach him to swim. Dante talks constantly, reads poetry, goes barefoot, and is comfortable in a way Ari is not. They become friends. The summer is bicycles, a desert road, borrowed books and a lot of lying on the floor of a bedroom. Then there is an accident in the street and Ari does something without thinking, and it changes what is between them. Dante's family moves away for a year. Letters carry the middle of the film. From there the story is about what Ari will not say. Dante is clear about himself early; Ari is not, and the film is patient with that. What the narrative is interested in is not first love but inheritance: two Mexican American families, two very different kinds of father, and a boy learning that the silence at his own table is a choice someone made. The parents are unusually well written for this kind of story. They are not obstacles, and one conversation late in the film between Ari and his mother is the best scene in it. The source is a novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz that has been widely read in schools. Max Pelayo and Reese Gonzales play the two boys, with Eugenio Derbez and Veronica Falcón as Ari's parents. Aitch Alberto wrote and directed; it was her first feature. Lin-Manuel Miranda is among the producers. Who it is for: anyone who wants a gentle coming of age story with real parents in it. Who it is not for: anyone who has read the book expecting all of it; the interior voice that carries the novel is hard to film and much of it is gone.