Imagine Wes Anderson adapting the Adrian Mole diaries; or, if you’d rather get all fancy (and writer-director Richard Ayoade frequently does), J.D Salinger’s seminal ’50s teen angst tome The Catcher in the Rye soaked up by the French New Wave.

Daunting inspirations all, especially for a British debut feature, where first-timers are usually in thrall to either Loach/Leigh kitchen sink-ism or Guy Ritchie-esque gangster leaning. Thankfully Submarine dives far deeper in its ambitions and surfaces with results so fresh and distinctive, it blows most other recent British films out of the water.
Ayoade, best known as über-geek Moss in cult sitcom The IT Crowd is a serious movie buff (as shown in his cinematic music videos for Vampire Weekend and The Arctic Monkeys) and so has taken Joe Dunthorne’s acerbically funny coming-of-age novel and layered in a treasure trove of film lore, from the obvious (Anderson and Francois Truffaut’s solipsistic anti-heroes, also The Graduate) to the obscure (try Taxi Driver with a bowl of custard).

But rather than seem too precious, Ayaode gets away with it because his protagonist, Swansea schoolboy Oliver Tate, pretty much insists on casting his humdrum adolescence as an art movie anyway. Oliver’s a self-regarding, self-mythologising dreamer, who scours the dictionary for impressive vocabulary, spies on his troubled parents – gauging their (lack of) lovemaking by their bedroom dimmer switch setting – and obsesses over losing his virginity to minxish classmate Jordana. In other words, he’s fifteen-years-old.

Oliver’s constant meta-movie-ness excuses and releases Ayoade’s own romance – with cinema. Alex Turner’s bruised, candle-lit original songs – more akin to his Last Shadow Puppets work than usual Arctic Monkey business – dreamily back lyrical montages of scratchy Super 8 footage depicting young love won and lost, lit by firecrackers and lens flare; and all the more moving given that it’s probably Oliver’s fantasised version anyway.

The film’s brilliant at pinpointing both teen precociousness and cluelessness, Ayoade’s canny framing and cutting dovetails with the witty narration to plant us inside his protagonist’s deluded head as well as any first-person novel. He’s aided by newcomer Craig Roberts’s note-perfect Oliver, his puppy fat features branded by world-weary, raccoon-like eyes, an ever-present buttoned-up duffle coat barely concealing his insecurities.

There’s also standout support from Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins as Oliver’s befuddled parents, while Yasmin Paige’s Jordana exhibits just the right blend of disaffected insouciance and vulnerability. Only the usually reliable Considine is hamstrung by his clichéd New Age mystic. To paraphrase Tom Cruise’s infinitely more interesting self-help guru-jerk from Magnolia, it’s hard to respect this cock.

Altogether more coy and less abrasive than Dunthorne’s excellent novel, the film also shares the same disinterest in actual plot, resulting in a – no doubt deliberately – loose, muted conclusion that’s a bit of a comedown from its sparkling first two-thirds. Nevertheless, it doesn’t dispel Ayoade’s audio-visual flair; and in a British film industry too rarely inspired by genuine film. Submarine’s movie-movie magic is a welcome depth charge to complacency.

Rise up and scope it out.