We don’t see the planes hit the towers in “Liberty Kid,” but given that Derrick (Al Thompson) doesn’t see the collisions either, the omission seems about right. Instead, the teenager is jolted from his morning nap as he rides the ferry to Liberty Island to start his workday.

As the bright September sun streams into the ferry’s cabin, Derrick mourns the fact that his latest crush has stood him up for a coffee date. As Derrick closes his eyes, director Ilya Chaiken (“Margarita Happy Hour”) cuts to the ferry’s clouded windows, which obscure the Statue of Liberty in the distance. We can’t quite make out the landmark, maybe because Derrick doesn’t so much as give it a second glance — Lady Liberty serves less as a source of inspiration for the high school dropout than as a paycheck. Fading to black, Ms. Chaiken bathes the audience in a moment of sensory deprivation, and then a roaring jet engine breaks the silence.

For Derrick, childhood is over. It is here, only 15 minutes into “Liberty Kid,” which begins a one-week engagement today at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, that this young man’s daily routine of work, beers, flirting, and lazy afternoons with his best friend, Tico (Kareem Savinon), evaporates into the air. What is initially infuriating about “Liberty Kid” — the winner of last year’s New York International Latino Film Festival — but gradually becomes invigorating, is the way Ms. Chaiken crafts a micro-story of a macroevent, and helps to put an exhausted subject into fresh relief.

For only an instant, we see the burning columns of the World Trade Center through the high-powered binoculars on Liberty Island, which Derrick pays a quarter to use, and for only a brief moment during Derrick and Tico’s three-hour walk home that Tuesday morning do we see the posters of the missing taped to fences in downtown Manhattan. But outside of these two iconic references, “Liberty Kid” tells the story of an insulated Brooklyn community that is slowly but profoundly affected by an event that few of its inhabitants seem interested in talking about. What’s most curious about this modest character study is that it may be the least explicit yet most affecting film yet to depict New York in the weeks and months after the towers fell.

Almost immediately after the collapse downtown, Liberty Island is shut down; days later, Derrick and Tico learn they have lost their jobs. As they look for new work in their neighborhood, one shop owner after another, clearly hurting for patrons, informs them they aren’t hiring. When Tico tells Derrick one day that he’s devised a new strategy for lining their wallets — dispensing drugs on the street corner — it is with a sense of desperation and isolation that Derrick, the boy who keeps describing himself to girls as a “visionary,” agrees. In many ways, it’s a powerless decision that parallels Derrick’s later discussions with an Army recruiter waiting outside the GED testing center.

There are elements of soap opera at play here, notably in a spontaneous mugging that leaves Derrick bruised and bloodied, in the introduction of a girl who drives the best friends apart, and in a subplot involving Derrick’s mother deciding to leave the city. But even here, it’s refreshing to see commonplace dramas mixing with such profound horrors as September 11 and the world it created. Unlike so many stories that would fit squarely into the genre of September 11 films, “Liberty Kid” is a story about friendship and family that just happens to play out in the shadows of the city’s darkest day. There’s even room for a healthy dose of humor, as Derrick, Tico, and a few friends embark on a foolhardy mission to scam money from the city by staging a car accident at an unmarked intersection.

Messrs. Thompson and Savinon alternate between fearless and fragile, draping their characters with an aura of sensitive intensity. They talk big, but are in fact terrified about the sudden downturn of their neighborhood, and in search of a survival strategy. Really, it’s Derrick’s eroding personality, the slow chipping away of his idealism, that fuels the movie’s haunting finale.

Fed up with the drugs, frustrated with his friends, and frantic over his evaporating prospects, Derrick joins the Army, and when he returns — wide-eyed and all but mute — it’s clear that something we came to cherish in this sweet young man has vanished. When the Statue of Liberty reopens, Derrick and Tico return to their old jobs, but it’s hardly a return to business as usual. Back out on the ferry, staring ahead at the statue, something about Derrick, about even Lady Liberty herself, is subtly but decisively different. So much has changed, so many compromises have been made, so many dreams have been shattered, so much blood has been spilled. Something is broken that can never be fixed.

ssnyder@nysun.com