In "The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet," the running-away letter 10-year-old T.S. Spivet (Kyle Catlett) leaves for his parents has got to be one of the most moving epistles in cinema history. Brimming with modesty, formal but warmly polite, it could have been written by a nice Japanese son. "I have gone for a while to do some work," is the opening sentence, and the letter ends: "You are one of the best families in the world."

For all that, however, T.S. feels he's unwanted and misunderstood. In his family home in Montana, everyone is an eccentric: His dad (Callum Keith Rennie) is a "cowboy born 100 years too late"; his mom (Helena Bonham Carter) is a fiercely dedicated entomologist with a penchant for crickets; his sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson) dreams of becoming Miss Montana; and his brother Layton (Jakob Davies) — his father's favorite — will "shoot anything that moves." They all live in the same house but lead separate lives, with the vast scientific talents of T.S. going unnoticed by his family.

Then Layton dies in a shooting accident and T.S. feels redundant. A call from the Smithsonian Institution telling him that he has won a prestigious prize for his invention of the "perpetual motion machine" prompts T.S. to pack a suitcase and head out to Washington, D.C. "Don't worry. I'll be fine. I didn't want to bother you by telling you about it ahead of time," he writes in the letter to his family. T.S. may be a blonde American boy but he has the soul of a self-effacing Zen monk.