Youth runs through the very heart of As You Are. The sparse, beautifully told indie drama, named after the Nirvana song “Come As You Are,” revolves around a trio of high schoolers in the 1990s, trying to find their way through the difficult maze of adolescence. Drugs, sexual fluidity, and ne‘er-do-well spirits blaze their way through the plot, which is loosely centered on two boys (Charlie Heaton and Owen Campbell) who become mock stepbrothers when their parents move in together, later pulling a new friend (Amandla Stenberg) into the group.

The story is based on a short film director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, 24, previously made, titled As a Friend, which he expanded under the tutelage of mentors like So Yong Kim and Kelly Reichardt. That makes this film the apotheosis of his teen dream—to make a movie about youth while he was still young. “So much of the genre is kind of condescending to the way kids feel,” he tells Vanity Fair, pointing out how some filmmakers cast too much nostalgia on the teen years. “It belittles the problems.”

Joris-Peyrafitte named the film after Nirvana’s famous track because he wanted to “tap into the energy” of the title—to come as you are, as painful as that may be, especially as a teenager. The film, in its own intricate way, does address the dense complexities of youth, including the difficulties of coming to terms with one‘s sexuality. The way it handles that topic—never preachy, brutally real—rang true for actual teen Stenberg, who was just 16 when she shot the film, and was “questioning my own sexuality” around the time she first got the script, she tells V.F. “I realized that I was attracted to girls as well as guys, so I really connected to it . . . it’s a movie about teenagers and who they happen to be. And it comes from a very genuine place.”

“Teenagers don’t really explore sexuality like, ‘Right now, I’m exploring my sexuality!’ ‘Right now, I’m figuring out who I‘m attracted to!’ ” she jokes. “It’s this really messy, kind of unclear, vague thing that happens over time, and you don’t really know how to label the experiences you’re having or how you’re feeling.”

The cast and crew (which also skewed young, maxing out in their late twenties) hitched up to Albany for about six weeks to shoot the film. Campbell and Heaton went up earlier, moving into a house together to start bonding as their characters. “While everyone else was running around in pre-production, he and I would just sort of go off and make trouble together,” Campbell tells V.F. Downtime was spent skateboarding along the roads and running around in the woods, he says.

“We ran around the streets of Albany and had races in the middle of the night and had sleepovers and danced,” Stenberg adds.

Heaton, who is British and currently stars in the Netflix drama Stranger Things, says the set felt like his “American summer camp.”

“Every night after shooting, we’d all sit, we’d make a fire in the back garden and we’d be engrossed in talking about the characters and talking about what we were shooting,” he says. “It was the most satisfying job I’ve done creatively.”

As You Are hits theaters on Feb. 24.

Check out exclusive photos below from the film’s set, taken by photographer (and costume designer) Miyako Bellizzi.