Christmas, Again isn’t really a Christmas movie–not like you’re thinking. It is set in the weeks leading up to, and through Christmas, it’s true. And the protagonist sells Christmas trees on a patch of sidewalk in Brooklyn. And his name, you eventually learn, is Noel. But writer/director Charles Poekel’s debut feature isn’t really about the holiday, and it stiff-arms the gingerbread-scented sentiment that tends to flood in at the end of anything cinematically Yuletide. The season merely serves as backdrop to, and intensifier for, an uncommonly good, low-key study of heartbreak, old and new.

Noel (indie-film comer Kentucker Audley) lives upstate, but for the past five years, you learn, he’s come to this patch of urban concrete to spend December selling Christmas trees in the cold for 12 hours a day and crashing the rest of the time in a ramshackle camper on site. It would be tough to say he’s happy to be back, vending evergreens all night in the dank chill. Of course, it doesn’t seem he’s happy about anything.

A hanger-on grumbles “Christmas sucks” at one point, but you never get the idea that Noel really believes that. Poekel telegraphs early on that Noel is a decent guy—he keeps the ad hoc lot tidy and gives the parade of tree purchasers friendly advice. (Water your tree with hot water when you first get it home, to loosen the sap. No tree dude ever passed on that nugget before.) But he’s a little shut down and irritable, bordering on morose. Poekel’s script lets slip that Noel used to sell trees each year with his girlfriend, Mary Ann, but that she isn’t around this year. It isn’t clear what gets Noel teary after delivering a tree to a glowing young expecting mother, but you can make your own guess.

When Noel stumbles on a young woman (Hannah Gross) passed out on a park bench in the freezing cold, you already know he’ll do the right thing and go to the trouble to bring her in out of the cold. And if you’ve seen a few movies, you will also suspect that her appearance represents a sort of blacked-out meet-cute and will fuel romantic tensions for the rest of the film. You will be correct, but it’s going to be so much better and so much more unexpected than that.

One of the significant strengths of Christmas, Again is its refusal to get cute. Not even indie cute. Noel’s name, and a late-breaking metaphor in the form of an idiosyncratic Christmas gift, are as close as it comes.

Poekel and Audley make clear that living outside for the month of December is so physically tough and spirit-crushing under the best of circumstances that Noel would only do it if he had to. (He pops Advent-calendar chocolates like daily medication.) Yet it’s also possible to detect a hint of romantic masochism in Audley’s stoic, internalized performance, with both stifled pride and abject sadness leaking out of his everydude features. When the girl, Lydia, wakes up and slips away unnoticed, the arc that brings them back together more closely resembles that of two strangers in a huge city than fated romcom mates. It seems a bit contrived when Lydia’s terrible boyfriend enters the picture, but he also serves to underline that Lydia might not be the girl Noel should pin his hopes on. Poekel drops a theremin onto the soundtrack at a couple of points, and rather than a quirk too far, it winds up a perfect fit for the film: melancholy, but astringently so.

So you doubt whether Noel and Lydia will, or should, get together. Then you start to wish they would, even though neither seems to wish the same. Then you start to hope that a fetching young customer with an accent requesting Christmas Eve delivery will perhaps save Noel from making a mistake with Lydia. Then you hope that they will get together anyway. And it never feels like melodrama. It just feels like life, especially the kind of uncertainty and loneliness that can hang over anyone young and unsettled, uncertain of what happens next. And what happens next is perfectly in keeping with the film that brought you here, and, really, perfect in any respect. It’s both hopeful and realistic, which is a neat trick for any film, much less one set at Christmas.

The Public Cinema screens Christmas, Again at Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) on Monday, Dec. 7, at 8 p.m. Admission is free.