In the beginning, and just for a little while, Tyler Taormina‘s “Ham on Rye” seems like every other no-budget suburban coming-of-ager you’ve ever seen, if maybe better shot. Carson Lund‘s superb cinematography, apparently influenced by photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, picks out boys riding skateboards, borrowing Dad’s Volvo, and talking about the crucial importance of boning, like it’s a philosophy, like they’re the first ones ever to have had so original a thought. Girls primp their frou-frou dresses and exchange back-spinning compliments according to arcane queen bee hierarchies, before posing on stairways as parents twitter and coo at them with cameras. You might even feel the anticipatory dread of the familiar: oh no, not another prom movie – tenderly observed, with just enough acne-ridden raunch to give a little edge to its otherwise placid, complacent lament for childhood’s passing – not again. But it quickly morphs into a different sort of anticipation, the distinctly pleasurable dread of the wholly unfamiliar, or rather, the deeply uncanny, the thing that looks so much like life that all you can see are the ways it is not at all lifelike. Turns out, Taormina mistrusts the high school dramedy as much as you do, and he’s here to skewer its inanity with odd insight and deep, perhaps angry melancholy: a cocktail stick of profundity pins this hoagie through the heart.