“I’m sorry for your loss.” That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone dies, says one boy to another early on in “Little Men.” And it’s a line that resonates, bell-like, through the rest of this small, beautifully observed New York fable about gentrification and growing up. The two 13-year-old protagonists of the title, unlikely best friends, gain many things over the course of the movie’s brief but incident-packed 85 minutes. It’s the losses — of innocence, of a retail store, of a neighborhood’s social fabric, of a city’s welcoming heart — that are unknowable and irreplaceable.
The director is Ira Sachs, who is becoming a master of New York miniatures, a sort of Woody Allen with his eyes wide open. Sachs’s movies chronicle who gets to fit in and who doesn’t in a 21st-century metropolis. “Love Is Strange” (2014) cast John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as an aging couple forced apart by regulations and circumstance; the new film, written by Sachs with Mauricio Zacharias, dramatizes the slow but inevitable collision of classes and conscience in a changing Brooklyn.
The “little men” are Jake (Theo Taplitz), a dreamy, socially awkward artist forever drawing in his notebooks, and Tony (Michael Barbieri), a brash character who wants to grow up to be the next Pacino. They meet when Jake’s grandfather dies and his parents move from Manhattan into the old man’s un-chic but cheap apartment in Bay Ridge, down by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Two decades ago, Brian (Greg Kinnear) and Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) might have been yuppies, but his acting career has plateaued and her psychotherapy practice isn’t enough to afford Manhattan, so back to Brooklyn they go.
The neighborhood’s still working class, a multi-culti stew of first- and second-generation immigrant striving, but there are rumblings out of Park Slope to the north. On the ground floor of the grandfather’s building is a dress shop run by Leonore (Paulina Garcia), a single mother from Chile; she and the grandfather had a friendship and an understanding that kept her rent low. When Jake’s family moves in, there’s polite amiability on all sides, but far back in Leonore’s eyes is the alarm an animal feels when predators come into the woods.
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All this hovers in the background, vague dissonance to the growing friendship of Jake and Leonore’s son, Tony. “Little Men” adjusts itself to the rhythms of children in the waning days of their childhood, keeping up as the two boys breeze through the neighborhood on scooters and rollerblades, play video games, chat up girls (in Tony’s case), or hang back from the fray (Jake). The two couldn’t be less alike except in their ambitions. Tony admires Jake’s talent and focus, while Jake is awed by Tony’s confidence — his quintessential New York nerve.
So are we. Taplitz as Jake is moving and real, but Barbieri is a find, the sort of motor-mouthed natural who actually could be a budding Pacino or De Niro. A scene in which Tony goes toe-to-toe in an improv battle with his acting teacher (Mauricio Bustamente) is the film’s out-of-nowhere delight, a found moment Sachs is lucky to have captured in a bottle.
Gradually, the conflict between Jake’s parents and Leonore intensifies and turns spiteful; gradually, it intrudes on their sons’ self-sustaining world. It’s the achievement of “Little Men” — and also maybe its failing — that there are no bad guys in this scenario, only the blinders of social class and the inevitable cruelties of changing neighborhoods and rising rents, here presented as a form of natural selection.
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Ehle gets less screen time than one might want, but Kinnear is very good as a softhearted man trying to be as tough as the city and his suburban sister (Talia Balsam) insist he should be. Garcia, the star and heart of the wondrous 2013 Chilean film “Gloria,” conveys all of Leonore, including her kindness, wariness, and a quick tongue that can turn a tense situation worse.
But it’s the boys’ movie first and foremost, with the parents’ fight glimpsed in the distance or relegated to background noise until it can no longer be ignored. Sachs doesn’t push the tragic aspects of “Little Men,” but they’re there, looming behind the life-goes-on vibe of the final scenes and waiting for you to work it out on the way home.
At its heart, the movie wonders what — and who — New York City and our surrounding society are giving up as we move further into the new millennium. “He cared about me, can you believe that?” Leonore tells Brian about his father and her landlord, and there’s the film’s primal ache — that it’s becoming increasingly hard to believe in an urban environment where caring crosses class and ethnic divisions and where market forces (or greed, as you will) aren’t squeezing the life and individuality out of one neighborhood after another. “Little Men” points quietly to where we seem to be heading and whispers I’m sorry for your loss.
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★ ★ ★½
LITTLE MEN
Directed by Ira Sachs. Written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias. Starring Theo Taplitz, Michael Barbieri, Greg Kinnear, Paulina Garcia, Jennifer Ehle. At Kendall Square. 85 minutes. R (thematic elements, smoking, some language)
Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.