Appropriately enough, Lukas Moodysson’s We Are the Best blasts forward like a great punk song. It’s spirited and loose and free. It smacks of jubilance and a certain willfully amateurish quality. It is utterly enthralling in its committed belief in self, in the notion that anyone can find their purpose by expressing themselves purely and honestly. And of course it’s lifeblood is kicked into motion by an act of rebellion. A pair of thirteen year old girls (Mira Barkhammar and Mira Grosin) start their own punk band, largely so they can reserve the rehearsal room at a local rec center, annoying some older teenagers who’ve been picking on them. Entirely unskilled at making music, they recruit a third member (Liv LeMoyne) after seeing her play classical guitar, and begin toiling away at their one song, a squalling winner entitled “Hate the Sport.” Coco Moodysson, the spouse of the director, created the graphic novel that serves as the film’s source material, and the film has a charming hardscrabble quality that suggests something that was sketched out on paper in an extended fit of creativity (images from the graphic novel make it look like it could have found a place in Raw three decades ago, snuggled in between contributions by Gary Panter and Mark Beyer). It locks in on small-scale dramas befitting the young protagonists, but treats them with the seriousness of youth, when every setback and slight is magnified in intensity. The decided understatement doesn’t slight the band at the film’s core. Instead, it honors the feelings that bound through the girls, whether stirred by parents, classmates, or even dumb boys.  By the time they’re responding to a major public setback with laughing fits as another authority figures sputters out his disappointment, it’s easy to believe in “the best” as a spot-on assessment.