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Tenderness drives at a delicate crossroads of moody tone and theme but doesn’t quite get there. Still, thanks to a rich, melancholy aesthetic; engrossing performances from its young leads; and a star assist from Russell Crowe, there’s enough in this brooding psychological exploration to fulfill altered expectations.

Small films whose artistic reach exceeds their cinematic grasp can be a hard sell to viewers seeking more up-front achievements. So an odd, differently wired work like director John Polson’s Tenderness ends up being hawked as a) a “Russell Crowe film” and b) a “tense thriller.” As you may have already guessed, it’s not either of those things.

Based on Robert Cormier’s novel, the film brings together three broken humans. Crowe’s Detective Cristofuoro is a sad, voice-over philosopher for the bungled and the botched and an observer of how humans are either seeking pleasure or running from pain. Exhibit A: Pained Lori (newcomer Sophie Truab), a 15-year-old girl struggling with sexual abuse, mis-wired self-esteem, and a dangerous confusion of death and romance. Exhibit B: Pleasure-seeking Eric (Jon Foster), a clean-cut 18-year-old homicidal psychopath just released from juvenile detention.

Cristofuoro once arrested Eric for killing his parents, but he also believes the boy committed other unsolved murders—so the detective keeps a close eye on the newly freed young man. (The cop has his own private pain: a semi-comatose wife he cares for.) Though she’s never formally met Eric, Lori has a past connection to the killer, and with her sense of self-worth tied up in self-destruction, she attaches herself to him as a sort of serial-killer groupie.

Meanwhile, Eric has arranged to meet yet another pen-pal lover of bad boys, a girl named Maria who excites his deepest, deadliest temptations. Tenderness follows all three as Lori tags along with Eric on a Badlands-type road trip from Buffalo, NY to Albany—with Crowe’s cop on their trail.

All that makes Tenderness sound like a tension-filled thriller, full of “will-he-or-won’t-he” suspense as Lori all but begs Eric to love her/kill her during their journey. But that’s not the story Cormier wrote or Polson and screenwriter Emil Stern adapted onto the screen.

I’ve long been a fan of Robert Cormier’s dark, pessimistic novels for young adults such as The Cheese Stands Alone, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, and his masterpiece, The Chocolate War. (You’ve heard me sing the praises of Keith Gordon’s overlooked 1988 adaptation of The Chocolate War.) Sprung from ‘70s pessimism, the late author took heat over his 40-year career for tackling grim, anti-authority themes in his novels without sugar-coating them for his adolescent readers.

Tenderness (published in 1998) stays that course with its focus on how love, sex, death—and yes, a twisted, ironic notion of “tenderness”—can get tangled up in a young person’s damaged psyche. The film, like Cormier’s fiction, is not about cheap thrills—it prefers slow-boiling psychological confusion to slasher scares.

Polson’s no stranger to that sort of traumatic and obsessive territory, having directed 2002’s Swimfan (Fatal Attraction for the high-school set) and 2005′s Hide and Seek (a child’s imaginary friend gone bad). And Tenderness is shot by Eastwood’s go-to cinematographer Tom Stern with a devastatingly lovely eye for the lost and the lonely and for the seductive beauty of destruction. Together Polson and Stern are drifting into River’s Edge territory, though at a slower, more deliberate pace. (Sorry, no manic Crispin Glover or Dennis Hopper here.)

Crowe’s more of a secondary player in Tenderness—his character is here to merely facilitate the plot and point out the philosophical themes, both of which the actor does with weary, low-key competence. (Laura Dern is also on hand for a few scenes as Eric’s guardian aunt.) But this is Foster and Traub’s show, and for the most part they deliver.

Jon Foster (Ben’s little brother) has been a personal favorite of mine since he appeared in the short-lived TV series Life as We Know It and the Jeff Bridges/Kim Basinger film The Door in the Floor. (He’s also from my neck of the Eastern-Iowa cornfields.) His performance as Eric is admirable in its restraint, but sometimes slips into serial-killer cliché due more to script laziness than any shortcomings on Foster’s part.

It’s Traub who’s the real find—once again the script sometimes lets her down, failing to flesh Lori out beyond her sad resume of dysfunction, but Traub shows hints of young Jodi Foster, Sissy Spacek in Badlands, and even early performances from Laura Dern. She gives Lori an eerie self-possessed awkwardness—a numb naiveté that borders on flat-out stupidity. We’re lured into pitying Lori until we realize just how messed up her victimization syndrome has rendered her.

How much you take from Tenderness will depend on how tuned into Lori and Eric you let yourself get—the film’s moodiness and attempts to weave the serial-killer story into a study of disaffected, disconnected teens are not going to be for everyone. And while it aims for deeper, heavier themes, it never quite finds the vision or energy to connect emotionally, to truly get into your head or under your skin. But even as Tenderness fumbles with its ideas and identity, the film’s complex, melancholy ambition and yearning, compelling performances make it worth a look for those whose tastes run darker.

Tenderness is available for rental from redbox.