In "Steal Me," writer-director Melissa Painter tells a time-honored tale: A charismatic stranger with a shady past drifts into a family and changes their lives. Telling the story from the boy's point of view, Painter and cinematographer Paul Ryan, who collaborated on 1999's "Wildflowers," achieve a visual equivalent of adolescent poetry, at times overheated with such adornments as color-processing tricks and angles askew, at times striking in its understatement. The viewer must assume that it's his outsider status, rather than any irresistible charm, that draws a hot-to-trot neighbor (Toby Poser), a precocious schoolmate of Tucker's (Paz de la Huerta, at times overdoing the wild-girl bit) and Tucker's lonely younger sister (Chelsea Carlson).

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