There’s a bracing image partway through “Amrum,” a new historical drama from the director Fatih Akin, that has the makings of an antifascist meme. It’s the spring of 1945, and word of the Second World War’s impending end has reached the residents of Amrum, an island off the coast of Germany. The general response to this news seems muted; apart from an outspoken potato farmer (Diane Kruger) who looks forward to the conclusion of “Hitler’s damn war,” the islanders know that their rage against the Nazi regime is, like an illegal radio or extra rations, something best kept to themselves. Hille Hagener (Laura Tonke), a Third Reich true believer, is shattered by grief; cradling her newborn baby, she murmurs, “What kind of a world is this for a child to grow up in?” Her tough-minded sister, Ena (Lisa Hagmeister), sees things with greater clarity. She pulls a photograph of Hitler out of its frame and—here’s the meme-able moment—quietly burns it on the kitchen stove, as if to mark the end of an era and, perhaps, of a collective delusion. Whatever uncertainty the future may bring, Ena knows that the only way forward is forward.

We watch the immolation of Hitler’s likeness and feel warmed, even hopeful. But Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), the eldest of Hille’s four children, looks on with wide-eyed curiosity and a measure of confusion. He’s the movie’s protagonist; he’s also an angelic-looking young stand-in for the German filmmaker, actor, and novelist Hark Bohm, who died in November, at the age of eighty-six. (Akin and Bohm, who were longtime friends, are credited as co-writers; Bohm was originally planning to direct, but eventually asked Akin to take over.) “Amrum” is a fictionalized memoir of a wartime childhood, in which the remoteness of island life is shown to breed its own specific sufferings and bestow its own strange lessons. The conflict may be at something of a geographic remove—the transfixing sight of warplanes soaring over the beach, or of an airman’s corpse washed up by the tide, comes as a jolting reminder of a distant yet ever-present horror—but its psychological effects prove no easier to shake, especially for an impressionable child.

Put more bluntly, the film is a Nazi coming-of-age story and a drama of deliverance, in which Nanning, a twelve-year-old member of the Jungvolk (basically, a kinder-Hitler Youth), takes his crucial first steps toward throwing off the ideological shackles. They’re not easily cast aside. Nanning’s father, a Nazi officer, is off fighting in the war; his mother, who gives birth the same day that Hitler’s death is announced, sinks into a depression that seems more post-Führer than postpartum. When an exhausted Hille declares “All I want is white bread with butter and honey”—former staples that have now become unobtainable luxuries—Nanning, a good, obedient son, sets out to make his mother’s dream come true. Soon, we are caught up in a boy’s grand adventure, though one that is grounded by a keen understanding of wartime scarcities. Preparing his mother’s meal of choice will require him to barter and negotiate with a baker (Marek Harloff), a beekeeper (Jorid Lukaczik), and a fishmonger, Arjan (Lars Jessen), whose brand of smoked flatfish has become an island currency in itself.

Arjan, a grizzled fellow with mirthful eyes, is one of many locals who quietly expand Nanning’s horizons. The old man once went to New York to make his fortune; so did Nanning’s grandfather and other Amrumers, a revelation that sheds new light on the pride, insularity, and xenophobia of this community, where even German mainlanders are regarded, contemptuously, as outsiders. Nanning, who was born in Hamburg, is bullied by a schoolmate who tells him that he’s no more a native Amrumer than the Polish refugees who have recently arrived on the island. Hille tries to reassure Nanning, noting that they are dwelling in their ancestral home: “Through me, your Amrumer blood goes back nine generations.” Tonke, in a haunting performance, gives these words an unmistakably fanatical chill. Hille’s every thought, word, and deed is governed by an obsession with blood purity. Clinging to her sense of racial and cultural superiority with an ever more unyielding grip, she seems utterly beyond saving. Her children, mercifully, are another story.

Fraught questions of national identity and dislocation have long weighed on Akin, who was born to Turkish-immigrant parents in Hamburg, and who charted the difficult journeys of German Turkish protagonists in his two major international breakthroughs, “Head-On” (2005) and “The Edge of Heaven” (2008). Since then, Akin’s restless streak has sent him all over the map—geographically, dramatically, and stylistically—and although he seldom seems disengaged, he has struggled to retain, or regain, the bristling urgency and jagged formalism that gave his early work its undeniable vitality. He confronted the Armenian genocide in “The Cut” (2014); went after neo-Nazi terrorists in the revenge thriller “In the Fade” (2017); and, most inexplicably, chronicled the life and crimes of a notorious Hamburg serial killer in “The Golden Glove” (2019), a little-seen abomination. My personal favorite of Akin’s films might be one of his most lighthearted: the shambling foodie comedy “Soul Kitchen” (2010), whose culinary concerns give it the slenderest of links to “Amrum” and its bread-and-honey mission impossible.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time. “Amrum” almost acknowledges as much; it comes billed as “A Hark Bohm Film by Fatih Akin,” an unwieldy yet moving onscreen declaration of joint authorship. But, by dint of its story and its subject, the movie also feels like part of a broader cinematic conversation. It can’t help but conjure the vast range of films that have shown us the horrors of war from a kid’s perspective—a field that has yielded a few masterpieces, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” (1963) and Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1985), and, more recently, an underappreciated future classic, Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” (2024). Curiously, and through no fault of Akin’s or Bohm’s, the children-at-war picture that “Amrum” most resembles on its face is Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” (2019), the rare film to which I’d admit a grudging, gun-to-my-head preference for even “The Golden Glove.”

Like “Jojo Rabbit,” “Amrum” tracks a young Nazi boy’s reverse indoctrination and moral awakening during the last gasp of the Second World War. (Both films also feature scenes of bunny slaughter, clearly a popular rite of passage for that demographic.) Unlike “Jojo Rabbit,” “Amrum” does not infantilize the audience, trivialize the Holocaust, abuse the music of David Bowie, turn Hitler into a grotesque imaginary-friend caricature, or shy away from the idea that Nazis might, in fact, be terrible people. The two films’ most relevant point of connection might concern their pint-size protagonists, both of whom appear to have been cast for maximal cherubic appeal, as if to short-circuit any qualms we might have about embracing a Hitler Youth in training. Billerbeck, a first-time actor and a superb discovery, is such an immediately likable screen presence that it’s only natural to wonder if you’re being worked over.

Worry not. Nanning is an engaging lead, but he isn’t sentimentalized. He is, like many children, susceptible to the pressures of obedience and groupthink—qualities that can be weaponized under totalitarian circumstances—but he also has sufficient clarity to be horrified when he learns how antisemitism has shaped his own family. His character is, in a way, as malleable and half-formed as the white coasts of Amrum: invitingly sandy beaches that can turn instantly harrowing when the tide rolls in. More than once, Nanning, carrying a precious portion of butter or sugar, must wander into that treacherous tide. In one instance, he’s forced to make a swift, momentous decision about the value of another human life.

He chooses wisely, and you sense, by the movie’s end, that he’ll keep doing so. “Amrum” ends on a freeze-frame closeup of Nanning’s face, a visual gesture that immediately invokes one of the greatest of semi-autobiographical dramas, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959). But, unlike Antoine Doinel, that film’s troubled young hero, Nanning is smiling. He has not broken with his mother, as Antoine does, but he has come to a healthy understanding of her and her limitations. He is, no less than Antoine, a product of a failed system—and “Amrum,” without spelling out how, leaves us with little doubt that he will outlive it. ♦