Screenwriter James Schamus turns director with this supple adaptation of the 2008 Philip Roth novel Indignation, starring Logan Lerman as socially innocent, intellectually precocious Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher from Newark, New Jersey. We meet Marcus as he prepares to leave home for a Winesburg Ohio college, thereby avoiding the Korean War draft. Both the father (played with incessant anxiety by Danny Burstein) and his wife (a smoldering Linda Emond) have high hopes for their brilliant son. Assigned to room with two other non-Gentiles, Marcus throws himself into his studies, rankles at the required chapel services, and finds himself entranced by Olivia, a blonde shiksa with sexual experience (a disarming Sarah Gadon).

Schamus has managed to pull off a tricky balance of Roth’s tangled portrait of a young man’s coming of age, against the backdrop of parents who no longer know him and the isolation of his uncompromising intelligence. After his uncomfortable dorm situation comes undone—triggered by an event of sexual candor between Marcus and his new girlfriend—the high-strung freshman is called into the dean’s office.

Well here the film dares to be true to its literary roots, and we are treated to a full 15 minutes of inter-generational hard ball between the self-righteous patrician Dean Caudwell (played like a Stradivarius by Tracy Letts) and the intensely defensive Marcus. Standing his ground, brandishing a passionate argument taken from no less than Bertrand Russell, the young man becomes increasingly angry. Feeling himself cornered, roiling with frustration, he ends up in the college hospital. I’ll skip ahead so as not to spoil some of the unexpected, and decidedly not Steven Spielbergian plot developments. Nothing is Disney in this quiet candid film. But the period details will make your teeth ache.

Oh, the Studebakers. The twin sets with pearls. From hair styles to tweed jackets, the film bathes us in the mid-1950s where all looks quaintly “square,” yet is anything but.

The ending is abruptly poetic, even if it has been telegraphed by the opening shots. It’s that ending that stays long in my body, and in my peripheral consciousness.  That’s what films do, especially ones that stay close and tight to a highly saturated subject. They live on for days, even weeks much as a great Van Morrison concert or a Mozart opera would. Not lavish or fast-paced, Indignation plumbs as deep as it needs to. Every performance is spot on, every face seems chosen for its post-war openness—it is quite clear that we are peering back into a world not yet fractured by the internet.

It’s a small-town America in which white privilege comes with a variety of hyphenated addenda: white Gentile privilege; white male Protestant privilege; upper-class, educated privilege. It’s all there haunting each beautifully shot frame.

Director Schamus doesn’t need a heavy hand to make us wince with discomfort and frustration over the angst this young man feels. Logan Lerman’s baby-faced honesty—his sudden incandescent surprise, and his weary exasperation with the cant and prejudice flowing through the veins of the educational system of this era—does the work of delivering Roth’s autobiographical book into our hearts and minds.

If there is an Oscar to be had by this bunch, it should go to the stunning Linda Emond who embodies Marcus’ caring, weary, deeply compassionate mother with nothing short of genius. For reasons filmgoers will discover, she cannot agree to her son’s new romantic relationship with the lovely, disturbed Olivia. The scene between Emond and Logan, in which she tells her son how he has been everything a mother could want, and how unconditionally she loves him but….and here she makes an emotional trade with Marcus.

Her heroic confession of how much he has meant to her flows with such clarity and controlled passion, that I found myself stunned.  I had been captured by this woman’s raw, authentic heart. (This happens a lot in Bergman films, or in Wagner operas.) I was no longer watching an actress, I was hearing the voice of alma mater. She was expressing the greatness, and the heartbreak of being a mother. Astonishing.

Indignation—terrible title, for a book and for a film—is difficult to characterize. It will leave you filled with as much loneliness as joy, as many discomforts as resolutions, just as I’m sure it did the author, Philip Roth.