Nasia (Candace Evanofski) shares a rare laugh with George (Donald Holden) in George Washington.

Writer-director David Gordon Green’s odd and elusive George Washington is less a movie than it is a photo album. But that’s not to say it doesn’t tell a story and not to say that it isn’t an ultimately pleasing cinematic exercise.

  Despite a homicide, a cover-up and a police investigation, the narrative in George Washington doesn’t ever really cohere, nor perhaps is it intended to. Set in a small North Carolina town that, to say the least, has seen better days, and filmed with local non-professional actors, George Washington is narrated by an adolescent girl who explains the interrelations of a handful of children and adults, mired in poverty and clinging to the margins of society. Twelve-year-old Nazia (Candace Evanofski) is a boy-crazy African-American child. She has just broken up with her 13-year-old black boyfriend, Buddy (Curtis Cotton III), because she thinks he "acts like an 8-year-old." Typically male, Buddy is willing to say he’s sorry if Nazia will kiss him one more time. But Nazia now has her sights trained on Buddy’s best friend, George (Donald Holden), a taciturn black child who often wears a football helmet from which the plastic face guard has been broken off. George does not return Nazia’s romantic inclinations, but that barely deters Nazia from peppering him with her affections.

  In the film’s pivotal scene, George and Buddy are rough-housing with two other children, an older African-American teen named Vernon (Damien Jewan Lee) and a blond waif named Sonya (Rachael Handy) who is perhaps 10. Shoved by George, Buddy falls, hits his head and dies. Mysteriously, the other children do nothing to seek help. Instead, after Buddy expires in agony, they drag his body to a secluded spot and cover it with refuse. A police investigation follows, but little tension is generated from it. For a moment it seems that director Green is venturing into territory explored earlier in Tim Hunter’s The River’s Edge. But George Washington never develops nearly that kind of narrative or thematic focus.

  Much that’s included here perplexes rather than illuminates. A factory worker of some kind promotes healthful eating and talks in annoying detail about bodily functions. A group of females at Nazia’s house talk about men and lovemaking in a scene that rings true without finding any meaningful connection to the film in which it appears. A shirtless white man who is friendly with the film’s young principals smokes a cigarette while riding his motorcycle endlessly across town. We never discover where he’s going or why we should care that he’s going there. Later this man joins George in exaggerated gestures of directing traffic that presumably doesn’t need their help in any way. We haven’t a clue what either adult or child thinks he’s up to.

  Other scenes, though, speak affecting truths about childhood and poverty. Nazia’s crushes are entirely convincing, and her apings of adult romantic excuse-making are funny and painful in the same instant. George’s stated ambition to become president of the United States is a touching reminder of the power of our national mythology and the astonishing distance that lies between what we profess to be and what we actually are. The pain of broken families is powerfully illustrated in a touching bedtime conversation between George and his 5-year-old sister as they confess to missing the mother who has left them in the care of their kind-hearted Aunt Ruth (Janet Taylor) and their abusive Uncle Damascus (Eddie Rouse).

  The human animal’s native instinct for altruism appears twice to significant effect. In one scene, George risks his own life to save that of a drowning white boy named Tyler (Christian Gustoitis) whom all of the other children disdain and avoid. In the second, Vernon recounts the astonishing generosity of Buddy’s mother, who would give him food even though that meant she would have to go hungry herself. In contrast, other scenes depict darker sides of the human soul. Vernon displays jealousy when he accuses George of "acting above everybody" after George is hailed as a hero for saving Tyler. Elsewhere, we are confronted with the ravages of low self-concept. Presumably an habitually neglected child, Sonya declares herself "not a good person," and we last see her after she’s stolen and wrecked a car, a serious criminal before reaching her teens.

  My favorite of this film’s series of vignettes, however, is one in which a sorrowful George visits his jailed father and offers words of forgiveness he has obviously not previously been moved to speak. "Sometimes," George says, "I love you so much I can hardly breathe." I can’t really contend that this movie works in most conventional senses, but among a solid handful of scenes that make it worthwhile, I can feel this last on the ear and temple of my consciousness like a whisper of warning from an angel of mercy.