If you don’t remember him from his breakthrough film J’ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother) that won him more awards internationally than he has room for in his Montreal loft, you certainly will this time around. Quebecois prodigy, and Canada’s cutest hipster, 22-year-old Xavier Dolan back with his sophomore film Heartbeats.

Here we are introduced to forlorn Francis (Dolan) and his best friend Marie (Monia Chokri, Quebec’s Audrey Tautou) and how their dangerously dependent and interwoven friendship gets wrapped up in a love triangle.

Enter Nicolas (the steamy Niels Schneider), the Audrey Hepburn-loving, classic literature-referencing, blond Adonis with a hippy, happy-go-lucky chip on his shoulder whose smouldering, pouty sexiness draws them in. And you can’t blame them. Nico is irresistible and by showing them each equal attention, his overwhelming energy starts eroding the friendship.

Does this sound simplistic and trite? It’s neither. Dolan is an understated screenwriter and director and a real heartthrob onscreen. He is smugly cute and boy does he know it, but his heartbreakingly grounded performance is beautiful. Dolan is inherently watchable.

As Francis and Marie slowly hit rock bottom and their sullen emo selves shine through, Stephanie Anne Weber Biron’s cinematography takes over. Her jerky zooms and continous basking in slow motion makes the film into a twentysomething hipster dream.

Above all else, Heartbeats, which should be translated from its original French to Imaginary Loves, dissects how friendship is affected by competition, and how we create internal lives for people that simply aren’t there. With lines like “a high IQ is a vital counterpoint to brown eyes” and “cigarettes keep me alive until I die,” it will no doubt be added to the DVD collections of any young artist in the city who’s looking for a little love in all the wrong places.