A young girl, Laure, and her family move into a new neighborhood. When she goes out to play and make friends with the neighborhood kids, they mistake her for a boy. Instead of correcting them, she decides to go along with it, telling them her name is Michael.

That’s the premise of Tomboy, the movie we saw Sunday afternoon at the Orpheum. I’m still not sure what to make of it. I liked the way they explored the complications that pile up as Laure struggles to maintain her fiction: She’s young enough to pass for a boy when they go swimming in the lake, but she has to hastily cut the bottom off her own swim suit and prepare it in other ways. But she’s not sure how to respond when a girl in her neighborhood turns sweet on her. Mostly, she simply lets the girl play out her own romantic fantasies, which is not too far from the way a boy would act.

Sooner or later Laure’s house of cards would have to come tumbling down, but I sure didn’t expect it to happen the way it did. There were lots of tears and some anger, as there should have been, but it ended on an uplifting, hopeful scene that hit the right note. I gave it four out of five.