The girl can't help it. In the drab suburbs of mid-'80s America, a shy teenager named Maren (Waves' Taylor Russell), eager to fit in at a new school, is gamely doing her best to go along with slumber-party talk about boys and nail polish; instead, she grabs a new friend by the wrist and... chews one of those freshly-painted fingers right off. Maren has urges she can't control, which is why her dad (André Holland) deadbolts her door at night, and why they don't use their real names every time they have to move to another town. But even he throws up his hands — hey, at least he still has them — and walks out in one of Bones and All's opening scenes.

Bones, which had its North American premiere this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, is not the first movie about gorgeous cannibals this year, or even this festival season (Fresh had a head start at Sundance). But it is directed by Luca Guadagnino, the Italian godhead behind arthouse swoons like I Am Love and Call Me by Your Name, and thus arrives with certain expectations: that it will be transgressive and romantic and probably inscrutably beautiful, or at least beautifully inscrutable. Once Maren connects with Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another "eater," in fact, Bones essentially becomes Cannibals: A Love Story. Beneath the visceral shock of its premise — and trust that there will be blood, along with torn skin and tendons and at least several organs á la carte — is less a straightforward horror exercise than a road-trip romance edged in darkness, in the vein of Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde or even Thelma & Louise. Take away the people-eating, and it could almost be a Springsteen song. Which often makes it feel, in a strange way, like Guadagnino's most traditional film to date — a born provocateur's faithful ode to a classic cinematic genre, only with human gristle between its teeth.

Fortunately, he also has a stable of actors who genuinely want to get weird, like Oscar winner Mark Rylance as Sully, a fellow eater Maren meets early on who speaks in a fluted rasp and dresses like some kind of carnie Indiana Jones. He's eager to teach her the life: tricks to sniff out a fellow traveler, how to minimize the risk and collateral damage of a kill — maybe too eager, with his keepsake bag of hair and tendency to refer to himself urgently and repeatedly in the third person (does anyone play malevolent kooks with more twinkly, slow-blinking glee than Rylance?). Chloe Sevigny and Guadagnino veteran Michael Stuhlbarg bring maximum strange to their standalone scenes, and of course there's Chalamet, Guadagnino's Call Me muse: His Lee is a wounded Tiger Beat pinup, a Kentucky boy in pan-gender thrift-store couture who lives with a desperate all-id intensity that often subsumes Russell's more tentative character. More than anyone, he leans into the ugly — even with those jutting, impossible cheekbones — and the vulnerability, too.

Maren's search for the mother she's never known, and the necessity of having to leave the scene of various crimes, drive the pair across the Midwest, in sequences that also recall recent films like Andrea Arnold's great reckless-youth elegy American Honey. Though they're mutually smitten, Maren remains far more conflicted than Lee about "the lifestyle," reluctant still to own what's always been inside of her. For both of them, feeding is an undeniable high, but they don't do it out of sadism or sociopathy; it's more like an unfortunate medical condition, or a recessive gene nobody asked for. One of the movie's most disturbing encounters, in fact, comes when the pair briefly meet a man (David Gordon Green) who isn't an eater so much as a super-fan; he doesn't have to, he just wants to.

Russell and Chalamet are both indisputably lovely to look at throughout, even in their insistent road-scuzz grubbiness. (Bathing on the lam is a privilege, not a right.) Guadagnino, working stateside for the first time, seems to revel in the dust and squalor of off-the-map '80s Americana, a place comprised of corn fields and carnivals and weed-choked parking lots. In all that, there's some deeper metaphor, no doubt, about carrying the stain of otherness, and all the ways that love and shame can sublimate even a person's closest-held beliefs. Otherwise it's just two crazy kids with hope in their hearts and a femur bone, perhaps, in their throats, running as fast they can. Grade: B+