Moving 'Summercamp!' is all about coping

Bug bites, lime Jell-O, homesickness -- "Summercamp!" gets it all, and so what? What can a low-budget, shakily filmed documentary about three weeks at a Wisconsin sleepaway camp tell you that your own gimp-strewn memories can't?

How free and how troubling childhood can be, for one thing, and how we all improvise our way toward growing up. Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price's movie only seems minor on the surface. Like all good nonfiction works, it observes the specific until the specific turns universal, and the universal until you find yourself moved beyond words.

It's the start of the last three-week session at Swift Nature Camp in Minong, Wis., and the counselors are nearing burnout. ("I love my kids," says one. "I hate my co-counselor.") The filmmakers introduce us to a handful of campers packing their trunks, all deceptively certain of themselves and united in their love of nature. Bailey, 11, dryly remarks that "most animals are a lot cooler than humans, who are like these pink blobs with no defenses."

Speak for yourself, honey. The children's fears and strengths surface on day 1, amid the cabin assignments and instant nicknames. Despite camp directors Jeff and Lonnie Lorenz's wish that it weren't so, the boys and girls, ages 6 to 15, immediately start with the rudimentary flirting and social gamesmanship. This doesn't always hurt. Stephanie cheerfully admits she loves camp because she has no friends at home and plenty here.

"Summercamp!" knows the camp experience is eternal and the same for everyone: Sunsets over the lake are generic only when not seen from your own bunk. With its gently anarchic indie-pop score by the Flaming Lips, the film nods toward the timelessness that's one of the best aspects of camp -- no laptops or Gameboys at Swift, thank you -- but it also notes where the modern world intrudes. A lot of the boys and girls discuss their ADHD medication, while a counselor scoffs that happily exhausted kids don't need pills: "If your kid's acting crazy, it's not because he had too much sugar, it must be ADHD, let's go pump him full of drugs."

Trying to take all this in, the filmmakers don't always keep their focus, but eventually "Summercamp!" comes to rest at the feet of two children, whose stories acquire gradual force. Cameron, at 14 one of the oldest campers, is a husky, immature bully who falls apart every night; you can see him bashing at the world and wondering why it keeps hitting back.

By contrast, Holly is a spooky little girl with a chickadee obsession that starts cute and just keeps getting weirder. One night she casually explains its source to her bunkmates, and at that point the rickety raft that is "Summercamp!" floats out over the deepest emotional waters imaginable. A shaggy-dog documentary suddenly becomes a film about how children cope -- how people cope -- and the payoff is a climactic campfire scene involving Holly that's almost unbearably powerful.

I wish we'd seen more of Spencer, a boy whose self-assurance is so graceful it's comic. I wanted to know if Tyler, raised by his mom after his druggie dad went AWOL, can resolve his sensitive and jock sides. How much of Bailey's artsy cynicism is an act? "Summercamp!" dissolves all these questions in the lazy August rut of talent shows and nature walks and s'mores. Is it too much to ask Beesley and Price to revisit these kids in a few years and start building the long-awaited American version of "7 Up"?

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.