The best teen comedy I’ve seen from any country in a long, long time…

Yep, that’s how much I loved Oh, My Buddha! If you have a chance to catch it in New York at its final Japan Cuts screening this evening, do so. Or if, during the coming months and years, you can see it via theatrical or home video release, again, do so.

My stridency in this regard surprises even me because, truth be told, of all the Japan Cuts films this year, Oh, My Buddha! was the one for which I had the lowest expectations. That’s because I find coming-of-age comedies to be frustratingly hit-or-miss, as I often experience even acclaimed examples of the subgenre as overly precious and clichéd. The brilliant thing about Tomorowo Taguchi’s film, though, is that it delivers all that such a film should deliver—it’s uplifting without being sappy, and it’s simply very, very funny—but never descends into the purely predictable. In a way, Oh, My Buddha! represents the flipside to Boys on the Run: both deconstruct and then transfigure what audiences expect from young-nebbish-in-lust movies but the former counters the latter’s manic nihilism with casual transcendence.

Sure, we sense that eventually our too-shy guitar-playing protagonist will get his moment to shine in a public performance, but even there the way that he shines is totally unexpected given what we’ve seen to that point. And in terms of the standard boy-meets-girl formula, Oh, My Buddha! consistently brings us to the brink of cliché only to pull away from it at the last moment with intelligence… and maybe even wisdom.

At the heart of the film is a highly appealing performance by non-actor Daichi Watanabe playing a student at a private Buddhist school. (And in case you were wondering, Buddhism itself is hardly a focal point of the film—until some scenes near the end, where it helps pull together things in a philosophical way that manages to be both light and profound.) Alternately awkward and inspiring, Watanabe nails his character without ever straining to get us to like him. Yet what really distinguishes Taguchi’s achievement here is the wonderful job he does working with his large cast. The script, from a book by Jun Miura, generously gives everyone a few moments in the spotlight, and they all seem to rise to the occasion.

The end result is a film with a novelistic richness to it but also one that provides us with a constant stream of great summer-movie moments. For this reason I’d recommend it to those who don’t even care much for teen comedies—with its utter lack of false notes, it’s just too much of an exemplar of its form to be ignored. Cute without being cutesy, warm without being overly sentimental, Oh, My Buddha! is the kind of film that make the old feel young and the young feel that… well, that they’re all right being young.

Oh, and did I mention that the film has the best Bruce Lee/Enter the Dragon homage in recent memory? Well, it does.