Little Men review: a small film with so much to offer

If Ira Sachs were a novelist in the 19th century, he'd be famous by now for his acutely observed works about the lives of modern New Yorkers. Instead he makes exquisitely crafted films on low budgets, at a time when small-scale, high quality movies are almost unwanted in theatres.

Sachs, who's gay, also makes films about gay life, although not exclusively (his straight characters are just as well observed). That would be pretty mainstream if he were working in television, but it further marginalises his movies. Distributors don't want small, gay and acutely observed – like his last film, Love Is Strange, with John Lithgow and Alfred Molina. They want big, loud and stupid. If they have to embrace quality, they'd prefer it straight.

It's worth a breath to consider where that leaves us: the business has always been more about dollars than art, but there was once a market for literate drama in cinema. Some would argue there still is: it's called television. That may be where most people will see Sachs' work – although probably through an internet-based service, rather than conventional TV. I guess it doesn't matter, as long as he can continue to make movies.

Little Men has so much to offer. It's capable of a number of interpretations, like a good novel. The little men of the title might be the two teenage boys at the centre of the story, or it might be the boys' fathers, only one of whom is present. Brian Jardine is an actor played by Greg Kinnear. Like many actors, he doesn't make much money, so when his father dies in Brooklyn, he moves his small family across the water from Manhattan, to the apartment where he grew up.

His wife Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) brings home the bread as a psychotherapist. Their teenage son Jake (Theo Taplitz), shy and artistic, bonds immediately with a streetwise neighbourhood kid, Tony Calvelli (Michael Barbieri). Tony's mother Leonor (Paulina Garcia) has for years rented the shop beneath the Jardines' apartment for her dressmaking business. She was close to Brian's father, Max, who gave her a cheap deal on the shop. She would like that to continue, but the neighbourhood has gentrified.

As in the novels of Jane Austen, the true subject of the love story is money, but Sachs takes his time getting down to it. First, we see the developing friendship between the two boys, superbly handled. Tony speaks with a broad working-class Brooklyn accent. He's as confident and brash as Jake is withdrawn and weedy. Both are artistically inclined, which is Sachs' way of shaking up expectations. They decide they will work hard and get into a competitive arts school together. There's no mention of whether one or both is gay, but it's part of the texture. What matters more is that they are close, because when Brian and his grasping sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) decide that Leonor has to pay more rent, the friendship is on the line.

Nothing about this seems unrealistic. Rents have risen markedly, Leonor isn't family, and she makes it hard by refusing to negotiate. Brian wants to be fair, but his sister is riding him. No one thinks to explain it to the two people who have so much to lose, partly because that won't change a thing. As people so often say when they are about to screw someone over, this is business.

Sachs is sometimes compared to Woody Allen but his observation of character is more political and not as funny. Where Allen would weave in a plot about infidelity, Sachs is more interested in the economics behind the emotions. He admits his Marxist viewpoint – almost unheard of in any living filmmaker except Ken Loach – but he's at least as much a humanist. For him, Little Men may be about the effects of gentrification; for us, it's about two boys whose friendship is about to be sacrificed by their elders for money. And about the reasons that fathers and sons don't talk. Take your pick; plow your own furrow. I'm not sure how Sachs continues to get his films made and sold, but let us be grateful, while it lasts.