For months, the IFC Center has been screening trailers for “Wild Tigers I Have Known” that pretentiously — or self-mockingly, you decide — proclaim the film to be one of the grandest visions ever of teenage angst and unrest. But as created by the director Cam Archer, in a head-turning, eye-popping feature debut, “Wild Tigers” proves to be a far quieter evocation of the confusion, loneliness, and giddiness running rampant in every high school.

This is not to say that “Tigers” — produced, among 11 others, by Gus Van Sant — is the least bit tame. On the contrary, it is a bold, disorienting, even cerebral tone poem, and Mr. Archer chooses his images and his metaphors much like a writer would choose his words and verse.

Logan’s (Malcolm Stumpf) world is a beautiful collage of fluorescent hues, but only he can see the spectrum. Beneath his shy exterior, he proves to be eloquent and insightful, but only when he’s talking on the phone. Slowly he’s coming to terms with his homosexuality through his isolated, masturbatory fantasies.

The movie opens to a blurry closeup of a high school wrestling match and the sunglass-wearing Logan fumbling under the covers of his bed, writhing in momentary ecstasy. Later, that image of pure joy will be contrasted with images of abject isolation — first as Logan stands motionless on a platform above a pool as his peers swim at him from every side, and later as he seemingly floats down the hallways of his school without so much as a glance from his classmates.

These literal images are interspersed with hallucinogenic episodes. There’s the recurring magenta spider that Mr. Archer puts on the screen as if it were crawling on top of the image beneath, weaving a web that blots out Logan’s dreams and nightmares — a web that finds its way into his daily life through the fences, nets, and telephone chords that disconnect him from the world.

More than once, Mr. Archer isolates Logan simply by denying the viewer access to him during key scenes. As Logan’s violent mother (Fairuza Balk) scolds him for dropping the groceries, we see only his back; as he takes his first baby steps in exploring his sexuality, a phone sex encounter focuses exclusively on the person at the other end of the line.

So it’s essential, before devoting a sentence to this movie’s “plot,” to first discuss the look, feel, and texture of Logan’s world. In an age of movies that like to spell everything out, “Wild Tigers” immerses us in its visual imagination and, in the process, turns one of the most clichéd of subjects into a surprisingly novel experience.

Those looking simply for a story will discover an awkward, shunned 13-year-old boy. As stitched together by Mr. Archer, Logan’s days at school go by in the blink of an eye, notable only when other students mock him for being gay or when he curls up into a fearful ball before going into a school dance or after enduring a beating in the bathroom.

His afternoons are divided between those spent hanging out with the prim-and-proper Joey (Max Paradise), who wants Logan to come over to his house, watch videos, and talk baseball — and who gets freaked out upon learning Logan is gay — and those spent with an older teenager, Rodeo (Patrick White), who walks with Logan through the woods, sharing thoughts, dreams, and fears. These moments, removed from society, provide the few moments of pure ecstasy in the film and brim with a sense of freedom and self-discovery.

But they are fleeting. At night, as the hours drag on and the forbidden dreams about boys become nightmares, Logan stares at the ceiling, flirts with picking up the phone to tell his crush how he feels, and tries to find an inner calm that will keep him from screaming out in desperation.

Ironically, the film’s title takes direct aim at these carefree respites spent in the woods. Brought into the gym for an assembly, Logan and his schoolmates are warned about a wild lion loose in town, told to stay indoors and, if confronted, to try and scare the beast. It quickly becomes apparent — even obvious — that Logan is the wild animal. More alive outside, finding himself an outcast due to his sexuality, Logan is the one these children fear, the one whom they counterattack in self-defense.

While Mr. Archer no doubt faces an uphill battle in finding the right audience — he’s a bit too transparent for the standard avant-garde fan and far too surreal in his vibrant, overlapping montages for the popcorn masses — he has surely taken a story about teen angst, homophobia, and schoolyard romance and twisted it to the point of rediscovery.

In a sense, Mr. Archer’s bizarre dreamscape is much like the mind of his character — disjointed, eccentric, and scarred, simultaneously yearning and revolting. In the end, “Wild Tigers I Have Known” may be ambitious to the point of being flawed, but those flaws imbue it with a texture we are enticed to process and understand. It is a jagged movie about a jagged character — but someone Mr. Archer loves so much that we’re willing to endure the pretensions in the hope of discovering just what makes young Logan tick.