We remember the boy.

Going on seventy years since “The 400 Blows” arrived on screens, one is still hard-pressed to think of a better performance by a child in a film.

James Dean and Jean-Paul Belmondo defined “rebellious youth” on film — the greatest punks in the cinema’s first recognitions of the type. But it took Jean-Pierre Léaud, just 14 when he shot the movie that made him immortal, to show us a punk-in-progress.

Little Antoine is into attention and mischief, an impulse-first/consequences-later child of a servicable if unhappy home, a school system with no tolerance for bad apples and a child welfare system that was nothing of the sort.

Putting a Tony Perkins/Tony Curtis child beauty in a turtleneck as he acts-up in class, cadges smokes, steals from family and strangers and sneaks into cinemas seals the deal. This is what cool looked like and now — an underage rejector of the status quo, a punk living on impulse, wits, passion and lies.

Truffaut’s 1959 masterpiece — recently restored — is appreciated for its sense of heedlessness, a freedom-relishing child rushing into adulthood without a clue what he’s in for but in a hurry to escape an intolerable present.

The kid is what we remember when we think of the title. But director of photography Henri Decaë’s gorgeously filmed snapshot of 1950s Paris wows us visually upon (4K restoration) reaquaintance, a true monochromatic masterpiece filmed in the almost-forgotten CineScope variant DyaliScope.

The critic-turned-director Truffaut made an unsentimental picaresque that can’t help but play as sentimental to a modern viewer, a period piece set, conceived and filmed in the period it sentimentalizes.

Antoine is “last in his class,” a kid who never quite seems to get around to doing his homework but who always has time to cut up to grab attention. He’s the one unlucky enough to be caught when a pinup calendar is passed around by his classmates. He’s the one dumb enough to escalate the matter, writing a bit of doggerel threatening the teacher (Guy Decomble) on the wall when he’s ordered to stand in the corner.

He’s a latchkey kid who takes a shot at his homework before Mom (Claire Maurier) gets home. But first there’s cash to snatch out of her stash. And when his joker of a Dad (Albert Rémy) rolls in, there’s another distraction and reason for not doing the assigned writing punishment.

“Ask your mother if a dish towel is on fire,” Dad jokes when she starts cooking. But some of his jokes have an edge. She’s beautiful enough to be out of his league and he’s suspicious.

The richer classmate René (Patrick Auffay) is his spirit guide to delaying exposure and punishment. They take off for a day of playing hooky, which Antoine explains away by saying “My mother died” (in French with English subtitles).

The reckoning for that and the threat of “military school” as punishment speeds this heedless kid down his Road to Nowhere. Dropping out, dropped into the juvenile justice system, he’s on the path to prison or Cannes Film Festival fame with this bad background in the making.

Truffaut, who co-wrote the script, suggested an autobiographical connection to his pint-sized hero and star, a boy who had his own issues with school at the time the movie was made. I’m guessing Léaud was far more of a punk than his mentor.

The complexities tossed into Antoine’s story veer between picaresque and melodramatic. He hides out in his pal’s father’s printing plant, then in the kid’s room where a pricey, collectible near-lifesize statue of a horse is stored. Antoine subsists on stolen bottles of milk and whatever René can slip under the nose of his rich, older father. Antoine has childish dreams of what one determined to grow up at 14 sees as his future, and thefts in mind to get him there.

Stealing tips from the men’s room attendant at the cinema is a no-no. But swiping a typewriter from his dad’s office is René’s idea. And when it goes wrong, it isn’t René who’s fingered.

Mom? She’s been cheating and the kid knows it. Dad’s gregarious nature can’t bear this suspicion and a “son” who isn’t even his who acts out as much as Antoine does.

Every element, from the daring to the conventional, sentimental and melodramatic, works.

And Léaud’s peformance for Truffaut set the standard for child performances to follow and Truffaut set the tone for how the best directors of children — his fan and “Close Encounters” director Spielberg, for instance — speak to kids and direct them.

Changing attitudes and the passing years make the movie’s frank treatment of the psychology of delinquency and suggestion that this “phase” shouldn’t mark children for life seem less daring than the film was upon release. But the lead performance and ultra-realism of the street scenes and street life captured here, rendered in beautiful images and “How’d they film THAT?” moments, make “The 400 Blows” ageless, a classic that can’t help but age life fine wine no matter how tastes, filmmaking styles and social mores evolve or devolve with the passage of time.

Rating: unrated, TV-14, violence, some nudity, children smoking, profanity

Cast:Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Patrick Auffay and Guy Decomble.

Credits: Directed by François Truffaut, scripted by François Truffaut and Marcel MoussyF A Janus Films/Criterion (restoration) release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:39