“Montréal Girls” is a sharply-observed, sympathetically-scripted coming-of-age story about a Middle Eastern med student who has his horizons broadened and his heart broken by the title characters, the gorgeous bilingual young women of the capital of French Canada.

What director Patricia Chica and her co-wroter Kamal John Iksander “sharply-observe” may be mostly cliches of the genre, the tropes of a tale whose lead is in med school but whose heart is in poetry. But that familiarity can be a sort of cinematic comfort food, like the nostalgia for punk “scene” that inspires this young man’s “coming of age.”

Ramy has his ears and eyes opened by the city’s punk nightlife and the wild children who still populate it. And his heartbreak is as predictable as the warning Ramy, affectingly played by Hakim Brahimi, gets from his Arabic punk-rocker cousin (Jade Hassouné).

“Yaz is a lesson you don’t want to learn!”

Yaz is Yasmina (Sana Asad), an exotic, raven-haired music promoter, a goddess from the same corner of the world that Ramy came from and a muse in the making. Naturally, the aspiring poet meets her after getting advice from the pretentious but popular French-Canadian street poet (Guillaume Rodrigue) who bills himself as “Phenix.”

“Go into the dark void, have your soul crushed...then rise again!”

Dude’s got to get his heart shattered by a fickle, faithless woman in order to BE a poet. Everybody knows that.

Moving in with his uncle (Manuel Tadros) to go to school has the side effect of falling into cousin Tamer’s punk world. That’s where Ramy meets the flirtatious blonde photographer Desiree (Jasmina Parent). And through her, he falls under the spell of the alluring Yaz, given the haughty confidence and world weariness of the beautiful and “experienced” by Asad.

The film’s opening act is its most arresting. Ramy dips into this world, a straight-arrow who keeps video of a last conversation he had with his dying mother because somtimes flashbacks aren’t enough to remind him or us why he’s in med school. Next thing he knows, he’s left the club, headed for a threesome, sampling booze, drugs, punk and cigarettes, and creating poetic twaddle for that day when he’ll buy a black stocking cap (like every screen “poet” of recent vintage) and recite his work publicly.

“Beyond the black velvet futility, like glimmering watchers in the distant cosmos, the signal fires from your eyes arrive, burning like a dozen stars after a journey of lights years to ignite the heart’s lantern.”

Well, what Montréal Girl wouldn’t swoon over that? Maybe after Ramy’s learned French it’ll play better.

The dialogue has just enough snap to register — “That girl’s like Chiclets. Sweet on the outside, but she’ll stick to you like bubblegum.”

And the familiar, easily-guessed plot points and story beats entertain just enough to compensate for how unchallenging and unsurprising most of this is. Whatever one thinks of poets, movies about poets are always a tad on the pretentious, tin-eared side.

Rating: unrated, substance abuse, fisticuffs, sex, profanity

Cast: Hakim Brahimi, Jasmina Parent, Sana Asad, Jade Hassouné, Manuel Tadros and Chadi Alhelou

Credits: Directed by Patricia Chica, scripted by Patricia Chica and Kamal John Iskander. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:34