“Frybread Face and Me” is a sweet, downbeat and somewhat melancholy coming-of-age tale about a Navajo “city Indian” sent to spend the summer of 1990 in the reservation where his mother grew up.

Writer-director Billy Luther, who is of Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo heritage, tells us a not-wholly-autobiographical story of broken families, heritage, family history and gender identity on a tiny sheep ranch near Pinon, Arizona.

Benny (Keir Tallman) is 11, and uneasily settled in San Diego with parents whose marriage is on shaky ground. He’s saving up to see his favorite band that summer, and expecting Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac to rock his world.

But wayward dad and unhappy mom bus him to her aged mother’s (Sarah Natani) ranch as they sort out their coming divorce.

Not that Benny knows this. He’s just trapped in a place he has no experience of, where he doesn’t speak Grandma’s language. A kid who likes Fleetwood Mac and playing with “action figures” is sure to be bullied by his bitter, broke sheepherding uncle (Martin Senmeier).

“You a cowboy or a cowgirl?”

Uncle Marvin won’t have the kid wearing his mom’s cowboy hat, or doing anything else “cowboy” until he proves himself. We get the feeling that’s not going to happen.

Help might have come from slacker/jewelry seller Aunt Lucy (Kahara Hodges), his mom’s free spirit sister. But she’s into her own thing. It takes the arrival of another dropped-off-for-the-summer cousin for Benny to meet his tour guide through this alien world.

She is roughly the same age, a big girl named “Dawn” but nicknamed “Frybread Face” pretty much for good. She speaks Navajo and has nothing but contempt for this “city Indian” cousin from San Diego.

“Have you met Shamu?”

Over the course of the summer, the family will be tested, granny will weave woolen rugs and dispense wisdom Benny can’t understand and Benny will plot his escape in lieu of developing a taste for mutton — sheep’s head included.

But the cousins will bond, playing dress up, dancing in makeup, skirts and scarves just like Stevie Nicks, and watching and rewatching the only video in their generator-powered single-wide, the sci-fi epic “Starman,” whose climax is set in nearby Meteor Crater.

Luther doesn’t hit the story’s discovering-one’s-sexuality elements hard, and serves up little dollops of tribal wisdom that play as weary bromides. Benny should be hunting for “hózhǫ́,” a life that will make him happy and content.

“If you go too far on the white man’s road, you lose your way.”

“Frybread and Me” succeeds by immersing us in this myopic world of laborious poverty. Marvin is resigned to being the “last in the bloodline” sheep farmer in the family, with hardscrabble “Indian Rodeo” fame a fleeting dream. Wandering fathers, beater trucks and barely-running cars with no windshields and life offering you little more than subsistence stares the viewer in the face.

The kids must figure out their own worth and consider what paths their futures hold, which parts of their traditions they will embrace and which they will flee. Their dysfunctional families must reckon with them and their choices.

And our filmmaker/narrator — Luther made “Miss Navajo,” and comes from a documentary background — will observe it all from the warm distance of memory. He’s given us a film that lets us assume that however close to his own story it is, we can be sure the filmmaker has achieved something like “hózhǫ” about his place within this world and how life worked out.

Rating: unrated, gay slur

Cast: Keir Tallman, Charley Hogan, Martin Sensmeier, Kahara Hodges and Sarah H. Natani.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Billy Luther. An Array release.

Running time: 1:23