Attention Starved Adventureland and Hunger mine the humor and darkness of indenture and deprivation.

Greg Mottola is hardly a household name, even to fans of 2007’s Superbad—the comedy that Seth Rogen co-wrote, Michael Cera and Jonah Hill broke out in, and, uh, Judd Apatow directed, right? Nope, that was Mottola, and though trailers for his new film, Adventureland, are pushing its coming-of-age story as Superbad’s tonal cousin, the film’s a bit more thoughtful than that. It’s melancholy and wry—add in a ubiquitous ’80s soundtrack, and Adventureland feels a lot like Mottola’s Almost Famous.

Not that the writer-director doesn’t punctuate the Cameron Crowe vibe of his semi-autobiographical script with boner and ball jokes. (A “double-sack punch” is a cheap yet inexplicably entertaining running gag.) One imagines Mottola’s stand-in is James (The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg), a college grad who wants to continue his studies in journalism—but not before backpacking to Europe with a friend. James’ parents (Jack Gilpin and Wendie Malick) tell him that they can no longer afford to fund his vacation, though, and that he’ll have to spend the summer of ’87 working instead. So armed with a degree but not a lick of job experience, James ends up at a beat amusement park called Adventureland, cleaning up vomit and arguing about stuffed animals as he haplessly mans the games.

Mercifully, James is surrounded by like-minded sad sacks, as well as the gum-smacking teen caricatures that such nerds feel both intimidated by and superior to. There’s Joel (Martin Starr), the Russian lit./Slavic languages major with Coke-bottle glasses who responds to a question about his career track with: “Cab driver, marijuana dealer…the world is my oyster!” On the opposite end of the spectrum is James’ literally ball-busting best friend, Frigo (Matt Bush), and Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), the park’s legendary lace-and-Aqua Net hottie over whom all the guys drool.

And somewhere in between is Em (Kristen Stewart—you might know her from Twilight), whom James immediately falls for. Em is both awkward and beautiful, too pale and quiet for the popular girls and too complex for boys her own age. She’s attractive to older guys, though, particularly Mike (an appealingly low-key Ryan Reynolds), Adventureland’s maintenance man who’s married and clearly unhappy as he uses Em for sex and tries to impress people with lies about having jammed with Lou Reed. So while James pines for her, she aches for Mike, wanting more from him but increasingly believing she’s not deserving of anything better.

Whereas Superbad may have been riotously funny, Adventureland’s strength is its truth. It probably helps that Mottola grew up in the Me Decade—he includes Poison videos and a repeated assault of “Rock Me Amadeus” for maximum flashbacks—but anyone who’s suffered through a McJob and its may-as-well-be-high-school cliques will appreciate the script’s humor and heartaches. The film deftly captures the sadness of a summer’s passing (a brief scene involving fireworks hits that familiar it’s July 4th already? chord) as well as one’s adolescence: Watching James and Em drink in an actual bar and talk seriously about sex, you’re reminded that despite the actors’ looks, this is not a teen comedy—yet, wow, how young college students still are, despite their fledgling independence. It’s a sweet time, and Adventureland is a sweet movie, its emotion punctuated by dick jokes instead of the other way around.

If you’re not terribly familiar with recent Irish history, be sure not to miss the opening minutes of Hunger, first-time director Steve McQueen’s award-winning film about the Northern Ireland prison revolts of 1981. Even if you do catch the introduction, it can be a little confusing: The lead-in text explains that the British government has revoked the political status of paramilitary prisoners (thereby labeling them criminals) and that more than 2000 people have been killed since the Troubles began in 1969. Never heard of the Troubles? You probably know the gist, at least—the IRA, Protestants versus Catholics, lots of anger, lots of violence—so you shouldn’t let the term throw you. But considering the film that follows is as spare as the explanation, it’s difficult not to.

Hunger’s alleged focus is on the hunger strike of IRA leader Bobby Sands. Except, well, that’s not quite the case. The script, by playwright Enda Walsh, first introduces us to a guard at Belfast’s Maze prison (Stuart Graham) who checks for car bombs before leaving for work and has to soak his bloodied knuckles several times a day. Then we meet Davey (Brian Milligan), a new inmate who announces, in union with his fellow IRA prisoners, that he won’t wear the clothes of a criminal. He’s walked naked to his cell, which he shares with Gerry (Liam McMahon), who’s smeared the walls with his feces, adhering to the second half of the prisoners’ so-called blanket- and no-wash protests. All of the inmates pour their urine into the halls and get scrubbed down only by force, usually dragged and beaten along the way. They eventually agree to wear civilian clothes and are moved to clean cells; when they see the “clown clothes” provided, however—mismatched togs better suited to colorblind golfers—they revolt.

Only about halfway through the 96-minute film does the focus shift to Sands (Michael Fassbender), and even then it takes a sharp eye to recognize that this is another character. (Now is probably a good time to mention that Hunger has very little dialogue.) The script pivots on Sands’ meeting with a priest (Liam Cunningham) to whom he announces his hunger strike. The scene is a standout: McQueen locks his camera on the two men sitting opposite one another, and Walsh seizes this opportunity to show off his skilled wordplay with a fast-paced, dryly humorous, and fiercely intelligent debate between Sands and the priest as to whether the deaths that will surely result from the strike should be considered suicides or murders.

McQueen matches the rhythm and brute poetry of Walsh’s words with images. Really, you don’t need to understand the entirety of Hunger’s backstory to appreciate the filmmaking. Long, silent takes dominate, allowing the viewer to soak in the vicious atmosphere: The worst of it occurs in the third act, which focuses exclusively on Sands’ physical deterioration as he starves to death. But there are plenty of other stomach-turning if exquisitely rendered details, from a guard’s shocking murder in front of his vegetative mother to Sands’ story of how he once drowned a badly hurt foal. Even if McQueen’s direction muddles the beginning of Hunger, he’ll have wrestled your rapt attention by its end.