The last couple of years announced the maturing and settling of a number of young, angry men. With The Wrestler, Che, No Country For Old Men, and There Will Be Blood came a motion to put basic storytelling back through its paces; Aronofsky, Soderbergh, Coen, and Anderson put their showy, ballsy styles away in search of purer substance. With Where The Wild Things Are, on the other hand, Spike Jonze loudly announces that at least one of our favorite auteurs isn’t ready to grow up.

Thank God.

Wild Things is an angry, messy, colossal piece of work. That much can be expected; it’s the product of collaboration between Maurice Sendak’s unapologetically regressive source material, Dave Eggers—author of the incandescent A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—and Spike Jonze, who has previously (with Charlie Kaufman as source) plumbed the depths of seething self-loathing in Being John Malkovich and the manic depressive Adaptation.

Wild Things is also magic, which is something you can only hope for, no matter who is at the helm.

The magic is due in large part to the extraordinary Max Records, who plays Max. All great coming of age films hinge on their remarkable lead actor; Records is amongst the very best. His willingness to go wherever Jonze asks—Eggers joked during the pre-screening Q&A that the crew had compiled a long list of injuries Record sustained on set (mostly from being stepped on, and eaten)—affords the film its most compelling honesty. That honesty is supported by the care Jonze has taken in creating Max’s world. Much has been said of Jonze’s insistence on using suit-mation and animatronics—limiting the CGI to the wild things’ expressions—but the result is, nevertheless, surprising; wonderfully expressive, organic creatures who are as empathetic (and beautiful to watch) as Max himself.

Dark, it turns out, is not quite the right word for a film that contains so much humor and joy; it is shocking, but the shock comes less from a lack of light than from a manic, violent intensity. Max’s emotions are frighteningly raw and intensely felt. When he departs to his far-off island and meets the wild things, whom Eggers and Jonze write as warring manifestations of Max’s troubled psyche, he finds himself without shelter from his own storm. And so the bulk of the film observes a nine year-old boy contending with enormous (and enormously powerful) monsters with the emotional maturity of nine year-old boys.

While Jonze treats Max’s ‘real’ life with subtlety and poise–the first fifteen minutes of the film feature the most efficient, elegant storytelling he’s ever been responsible for—the film really begins after the strangely compacted transition (one of the few places the pace seems a little too aggressive) from our world to the island of the wild things. Here we are treated to a great tragedy: even in the paradisiacal land of the wild things—where anything seems possible, where Max can be king—there is anger, fear, pessimism, and, most of all, loneliness. It becomes Max’s impossible task to make all of those very real things disappear.

I use the word ‘real’ because not for a moment when watching the film was I able to reassure myself that Max would be ok, that it was all a dream, even though, obviously, it is. Very few films commit as successfully to their protagonist’s point of view. The powerful subjectivity in Wild Things is due, in part, to the intensely personal (read: auto-biographical) reading Jonze gives Sendak’s framework. It’s also due to how deeply Eggers and Jonze have allowed Sendak’s original to effect them. Even the narrative and pace of the film is oddly Sendakian; like the book (and the stories Max makes up over the course of the film), the events unfold in a blind cascade rather than a traditional film structure—this happens and then that happens, and then another thing, and, wait, also. . . .

Our powerful identification with Max is also due to Jonze’ strategy of overloading the audience with sensory information. When Max gets angry, the music builds to an intensity that makes it difficult to think. The projectionist at our screening had the film play loud, loud, loud, and Jonze has layered so much of the film with a largely vocal score that you sometimes feel yourself swimming in voices. It’s a tactic that’s rarely used well outside of horror movies; in fact, the only movie that comes to mind is Punch-Drunk Love.

Punch-Drunk and Wild Things actually have a lot in common. Both films trap the viewer in a world that seems a reflection of the main character’s psyche; a world where pain is very real, and solutions are hard to find. Both films, ultimately, find a safe place for their unlikely heroes—no small task. But Jonze actually outmatches Anderson, here. Wild Things, unlike Punch-Drunk, manages never to condescend. We never laugh at Max, only with him. And in Wild Things there is also a deep melancholy when the journey is over. We’ve found ourselves just like Max: far away, in an experience both joyous and frightening and curiously visceral. We end up tired and sad and relieved. And we need to be taken home.