“Camera” is an indie ode to taking photographs on celluloid wrapped around a poignant coming of age story set in a fishing town that’s going down — emptying out and dying of old age.

It’s right in the wheelhouse of director Jay Silverman, whose “Saving Paradise” has similar sentimental themes and a setting about to lose its pencil factory. Filmed in scenic Morro Bay, and patient to the point of “slow,” “Camera” is lifted by the grace notes only seriously seasoned actors can add to your independent film.

Beau Bridges twinkles into the sunset and Bruce Davison rages rages “against the dying of the light” as two elders in tiny, shrinking Jasper’s Cove.

That’s where young Oscar (Miguel Gabriel) and his widowed mom (Jessica Parker Kennedy) have settled, a pretty spot with zero prospects — she waits on tables at the diner — and just enough kids for silent Oscar to face relentless bullying.

He walks around the village, silently observing, often through the waist level (“look down”) viewfinder of his classic Mamiya large format twin lens reflex camera. It’s broken, but he can still pretend it works.

Wandering into Eric’s fix-it shop brings the introverted child under the influence of widowed owner Eric (Bridges), a tinkerer with a bit of an edge, but a soft spot for kid who draws pictures of photos that he can’t capture with his busted camera. Eric learns, through Oscar’s limited collection of communication cards, the boy’s name. And he lends him a functioning Mamiya, with a roll of large format film in it, to go out and take real photos with.

“Great photographers think before they click,” he advises.

The scenes where the boy the locals have labeled “odd” “sees” the town — and occasionally photographs people who don’t want to be snapped — are pretty close to magical.

Oscar picks up on the weariness and despair — especially among the dying-out fishermen. They’re rude to Oscar’s waitress mom, pinning their hopes on elder statesman Frank Flynn (Davison) and his efforts to land a fishing cannery for a fishery and dining palette that probably have no need for it.

Frank’s in conflict with his pub-owning son, Dermot (Scott Partridge), who is leading efforts to lure a resort hotel to this gorgeous spot.

Manny (Jorge-Luis Pallo) is caught between the two, a last generation fisherman ready to give up and find something else to do.

As Oscar relishes learning from his grandfatherly new friend, his hustler uncle (Scotty Tovar) rolls in, another source of conflict in a village with no shortage of unhappy inhabitants. Tested by this, bullied and obsessed by this camera, Oscar can’t hope to grow up happy unless something changes.

“You can’t live your whole life behind a lens,” Eric advises.

Silverman, working from a just-edgy-enough-script by Jamie Murphy and Joseph Gamache, drifts from Oscar’s point of view to that of sentimental Eric and embittered Frank. The character arcs don’t have anyone taking a particularly long journey of the heart. And melodramatic “miracles” are for other, Hallmark Channel-bound versions of this tale.

It’s a slight story engagingly told, with through-the-viewfinder moments that take us back to the days when everyone wasn’t a photographer and the world wasn’t a sea of cell phone images, few of them as composed and well-considered as those captured here.

And Bridges and Davison preside over this elegy with intimate, subtle and affecting performances that lift the entire undertaking to the edge of poetry.

Rating: 16+, violence, drugs, profanity

Cast: Beau Bridges, Miguel Gabriel, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Jorge-Luis Pallo, Scotty Tovar, Ross Partridge and Bruce Davison.

Credits: Directed by Jay Silverman, scripted by Jamie Murphy and Joseph Gamache. A VMI Releasing film on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:52