Fireflies. Biking in flip-flops. Driving a speedboat fast across a Great Lake, the wake churning white and the water shining silver. And four friends — two of them in love — the summer after high school, clinging to these small and beautiful moments as hard as they can, knowing that change will come.

In Jared Isaac's directorial debut, "An Autumn Summer," it's 2010, and 18-year-old Kevin Schmidt (Mark McKenna) is two months into his family's annual summer trip to northern Michigan when they're joined, as usual, by his best friends Jay (Jun Yu) and Marty (Julian Bass) and girlfriend Cody (Lukita Maxwell). Within 15 minutes, the audience is fully immersed in these teenagers' lives; their history is vividly felt onscreen, through specific, frequently funny dialogue and easy physical contact.

It can be difficult to accurately characterize 18-year-olds, old enough to consider profound, adult questions yet still a children in many respects. Isaac's script skillfully captures this liminality and the fear that comes with it: “With autonomy comes making the decisions,” says Marty, who's taking a year off after school, “and my brain is like, 'No, absolutely the fuck not, you're too lazy for that.'”

As the quartet's last month together progresses, the idyllic activities they've done for years — reading books out loud to each other, partying with other teens in town for the summer, cliff diving —begin to feel melancholy, especially for Kevin and Cody, bound for different colleges and avoiding any discussion of their future. McKenna and Maxwell have astonishing chemistry, and their characters' relationship is easy to root for, even while the odds are against them. Sequences in which Kevin's father (Tony Horton) describes reuniting with his mother (Louise Barnes) “two years and 18 days” after their final college breakup, and Kevin's grandmother (Joette Waters) talks about meeting her late husband as a teenager, make Cody and Kevin's plight even more poignant, giving them examples of people who fell in love young and stayed together in circumstances that no longer exist.

The running motif of readings from "The Stardust Compendium," a fantasy novel where a princess chooses to remain under a spell rather than face reality, is sometimes too obvious a metaphor, but it also produces some of the film's most striking scenes, like a moment where Cody's ranting about the princess “choosing the memory over living” turns into a kiss that literally lifts the two off the pier and into the starlit sky. While this is the most explicitly magic realist image in the film, cinematographer Brandon Somerhalder, a 2022 Oscar winner for the documentary short “The Queen of Basketball,” casts a spell throughout with his gorgeous photography of light, wind, and water. The calm ambient score by Hayes Bradley, paired with jangly indie rock, helps set the tone.

"An Autumn Summer" is a film for anyone who wants to recapture the fierceness of friendship and romantic love on the cusp of adulthood, nostalgic but not self-indulgent, realistic but not bleak. Writer/director Isaacs and stars McKenna and Maxwell are formidable talents to watch.

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Anna Andersen co-hosts Your Favorite Bad Movie Podcast with their husband. They have three cats named Brains, Hamburger, and Twinkle.

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