There is a truism of storytelling that I think uniquely consistent in its accuracy: Intense specificity is the key to creating a fiction that is strikingly universal. I well remember 1983, the year in which Call Me By Your Name is set, but I can say with certainty that my youthful experience was unlike that of the film’s protagonist, seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet), in practically every way. Even if I can’t exactly relate to a teen experience of falling in love with a handsome male academic (Armie Hammer) against a picturesque Italian landscape, all under the watchful affection of intellectually and culturally advanced parents (Amira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg), I feel a bracing recognition in watching every bit of what Elio goes through. That’s in part because of the artful writing (by James Ivory, adapting an André Aciman novel) and in part because of the patient, probing, lyrical direction of Luca Guadagnino. And much of it can be laid directly at the shuffling feet of Chalamet, who captures the adolescent process of establishing a strong sense of self, marked by petulance, impulsiveness, curiosity, doubt, confidence, and rawness, often swirling together in a woozy morass of reverberating emotion. Call By You Name is piercing in its beauty and its honesty. In telling one story with spirit and grace it seems to touch on all stories, drawing them together in a sense of broad understanding, at least for any who care to look.