Back when all the girls in school wore knee socks and all the boys wore coonskin caps, life was a lot more innocent. Of course, as the movie Moonrise Kingdom shows us, part of that carefree lifestyle was that adolescents could carry around a full cache of extremely dangerous tools without any supervision, but you take the good with the bad.

In the summer of 1965, New England’s New Penzance Island is abuzz with the sudden disappearance of 12-year-olds Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop (Jared Gilman, Kara Hayman). The two have long been planning to get out of their unhappy lives after a year of trading letters as pen pals. For Sam, it’s leaving behind a string of foster homes and a stint with Khaki Scout Troop 55, both of which are full of kids and authority figures who can barely tolerate him. Suzy, on the other hand, can’t be around her bickering lawyer parents (Frances McDormand, Bill Murray) for one day longer. With both youngsters gone and traversing the island, Suzy’s folks and Sam’s Scout Master (Edward Norton) demand the sheriff (Bruce Willis) get them back immediately. But, as search parties set out to find them, Sam and Suzy only increase their efforts to get away from those who have been making them miserable and focus on their budding romance.

Complete unknowns, Gilman and Hayman are a couple of fantastic finds, especially with a story that lets them bring their full talents to the forefront as the typical kids who everybody knew growing up and labeled as weird before even getting to know them. Sam, of course, seems to be a hopeless case as an orphan who can’t stay out of trouble with anyone who takes him in, but he only needs someone to see the gentle soul in him and bring it out. Suzy isn’t as easy to pinpoint as the less tormented but more outwardly angry of the duo, preferring to distance herself from the world via a pair of binoculars. Clearly this is a genetic trait, judging by Murray’s and McDormand’s tendency to speak with a bullhorn in or out of the house. And, when they’re not doing that, they take on a courtroom role and refer to each other only as “counselor.”

Willis is wonderful as the local lawman who’s never had much more than an issue of a cat up a tree while wearing the badge, making a manhunt all the more difficult. The fact that he’s carrying on an affair with the missing girl’s mom doesn’t alleviate the problem. Norton is a delight as the scout leader with a seriously lacking sense of responsibility regarding his charges. We know it’s the ’60s, but even the most lackluster caretaker wouldn’t let a child wield a branch with a handful of nails pounded into it as a makeshift mace, as seen by his motley crew of Lost Boys-type scouts, who are more than happy to take the law into their own hands and wrangle up the deserter. Tying all these personalities together is Bob Balaban as a monotone narrator giving exposition about the geography of the region while clad in a toque and parka, invoking memories of the director’s Team Zissou, but this story is a lot more involving than that Jacques Cousteau wannabe.

Filmmaker Wes Anderson has rarely strayed from the stone-faced characters, dry dialogue, and painstaking color palette that made him famous with Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and so on. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily repetitive. In fact, his latest movie heralds a whole new turn in his career with the tale of two misfits. Sure, it’s the kind of story that’s been told before, but Anderson’s approach is, as ever, totally one-of-a-kind. His penchant for writing social oddballs, who yearn for something more, is perfectly modulated for the youthful Romeo and Juliet who are too young for sex but mature enough to venture beyond first base. Anything is possible in this stage of life, but that doesn’t mean they’re shielded from disappointments. The melancholy, sometimes downright sad tone is heightened by the coastal Rhode Island shooting locations which Sam and Suzy make their way around as well as the production of Benjamin Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” that first brings them together and plays an important role at the climax as a hurricane overtakes the town. The plethora of Britten’s music that plays throughout the film in its entirety — alongside Alexandre Desplat’s original score — just goes to show how any other director but Anderson probably would have just filled the soundtrack with bubblegum pop and called it a day.

Every one of Anderson’s movies has a layered, dimensional feel to it, but Moonrise Kingdom is the first of his works in about a decade that has worked on every level. All the details here click together from the ensemble cast to the crucial sound and visual arrangement, and just like a Khaki Scout striking two rocks together to make a campfire; Anderson starts with a spark of artistic inspiration and gives us a raging inferno of pure magic.

Rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars

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