“Little Men” only looks like a small movie.This 3D fighter is a definite upgrade from its 2D predecessor, with detailed characters and easy controls, but its weak story and ad-focused push keep it from being a perfect action title. Sachs, in his last three features - this one, “Love Is Strange” and “Keep the Lights On” - has refined a style of emotional realism that stands out against both the mumbly diffidence and the sociological scorekeeping of too much independent American cinema. It’s a boys adventure story edged with unspoken risks, and the young actors take the kind of chances that their more careful and disciplined elders have been trained to avoid. When parents are around, “Little Men” feels like a modest, precise drama of urban life, but when it follows Tony and Jake, absorbing the loose rhythms of their companionship, the film becomes something richer and harder to classify. The two boys conceive a plan to apply to a specialized arts high school together. He’s gregarious and easygoing and dreams of being an actor. Jake is a hothouse flower, his artistic talents and sensitivities carefully cultivated by his parents. Their temperaments and backgrounds are different, as are their interests. In other words, “Little Men” is on the side of Jake and Tony, as both a narrative strategy and a moral choice.

Sachs holds the adults at arm’s length, declining either to judge them too harshly for their selfishness or to extend them more than minimal sympathy for their difficulties.

Jake’s mother, Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), who is a bit more decisive, is a therapist, and her smiling demeanor acts as a shield against the unspoken tensions hovering in the air whenever she and her husband are together. He works, but he mostly worries, tries to be a nice guy and feels guilty when he fails at it. His father, Brian (Greg Kinnear), might be described as a struggling actor if it didn’t seem that the fight had mostly gone out of him. Jake, pale and reserved, is an exile from Manhattan. They are Jake Jardine (Theo Taplitz) and Tony Calvelli (Michael Barbieri), two middle schoolers who cross paths in Brooklyn. And it may be that association that imparts a novelistic vibe to Ira Sachs’s “Little Men.” It’s a subtle movie, alert to the almost imperceptible currents of feeling that pass between its title characters. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have a rich and renewable legacy. Literature has more to offer, at least as far as boys are concerned. There is hardly a shortage of buddy movies about mismatched men bonding under duress, but films that chart the emotional weather of everyday male friendship are rare.

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