The restless camera and jutting close-ups common to indie filmmaking seem gracefully apt in Sam Fleischner’s film about an autistic adolescent who becomes lost in the subway system in the days just before Hurricane Sandy.
His mother, Mari (Andrea Suarez Paz), works in the Rockaways as a housekeeper — an undocumented immigrant, her status complicates her frantic search for her son. The boy, Ricky, is played by Jesus Sanchez-Velez, a non-professional who himself has Asperger’s. Sanchez-Velez has a sober, intense face that pulls you in, especially when Ricky’s physical condition begins to deteriorate.
This is the sort of movie that gets called “hallucinatory,” but it is strongly grounded in the New York in which 99 percent of us live. Fleischner gets his uncanny effects simply by showing what this city looks like to a child who has a different filter.