Finally, a children’s movie for the discerning child. As artisanal and pungent as a Cobble Hill cheese shop, Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is an exquisitely tailored film. Haynes, working with a script by author Brian Selznick based on his 2011 novel, has imbued Wonderstruck with an abundance of graceful style and detail. He carefully and credibly renders two different time periods to tell the story of two children heading into a storybook New York City on quests for definition. The film is a mighty thing to behold, offering up a lush visual and aural landscape that is frequently breathtaking. So why did I leave the theater so unmoved?

Perhaps it’s the whiff of pretension that comes cutting through all of the film’s finely calibrated dreaminess. Well, maybe “pretension” isn’t exactly the right word. More like tweeness, a satisfaction with its own cleverness. Selznick also wrote the book that Martin Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan turned into Hugo, another whimsical and self-regarding contraption of a kids movie. So it isn’t exactly a surprise that Wonderstruck is similarly awed by its own marvelous inventions, infatuated with the specialness of its vaguely irksome child heroes.

What is a surprise is that Todd Haynes would let this happen. No stranger to sentiment but previously resistant to sap, Haynes is the rare technician who also has a piercing emotional intelligence. His last film, the handsomely mounted and deeply affecting Carol, married the two halves of Haynes’s prodigious creative brain just about perfectly. We see flashes of that same synthesis in Wonderstruck, when Haynes reveals the heartbeat behind all these beautiful pictures. But Selznick’s script ultimately proves fatal to whatever incisive humanity Haynes lends to the story. The film is downright sloppy at the end—no less gorgeous to look at and listen to, but narratively rushed and manipulative. In a war between Haynes’s judicious intellect and Selznick’s boutique treacle, the treacle eventually wins.

Wonderstruck concerns a young deaf girl, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), living in 1927 Hoboken, and a young hearing (for a time) boy, Ben (the magnificently named Oakes Fegley), who’s just lost his mother to a car accident in 1977 Minnesota. Rose, whose story is filmed in rich black and white, is obsessed with silent movies, especially those starring Lillian Mayhew, a grand diva played by Julianne Moore. Ben, meanwhile, is plagued by dreams in which he is chased by wolves, nightmares that may simply be stoked by his mother’s recent death, or could mean something else altogether. Both kids long for a sense of home and place, a yearning that brings them to the thrilling jumble of Manhattan on separate mild adventures.

In particular, Rose and Ben are drawn to the Museum of Natural History, that great and antiquated cabinet of curiosities that is a paradise for the kind of kid that Selznick (and, by extension, Haynes) want you to believe exists: possessed of a childlike awe for the quaint and analog, perspicacious and thoughtful beyond their years. In that way, the film often brings to mind Brooklyn author Jonathan Safran Foer’s unbearably contrived 9/11 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, in which a precocious little boy unlocks a mystery about his father while taking a quirky tour of Manhattan and its varied people. Both Wonderstruck (at its worst moments) and Extremely Loud (in its entirety) perform an accidental bit of self-nullification: they want us to appreciate the magic of our own world by immersing us in something that looks and sounds almost nothing like it.

There’s also the simple problem of the film’s storytelling, stilted and cluttered as it is. The separate stories do (spoiler alert) eventually come together, but they do so in a long, ungainly bit of exposition toward the end of the film—a sequence that isn’t rescued by Haynes’s nonetheless nimble use of dioramas and miniatures, which bring to mind his first film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Selznick has a lot of narrative to cram in, and he does so awkwardly, leaving more than a few plot holes gaping wide open, narrative strings frustratingly untied. It’s telling that after happily bathing in Haynes’s sumptuous aesthetics for two hours, I still didn’t much care about the two main characters, nor the twists of time and fate that brought them together.

I have a few other complaints to raise before I tell you what is really and truly good about this film. While Simmonds gives an expressive performance, seemingly snatched right out of the 1920s, Fegley has trouble with some of his heavier lifting. Which is a disappointment, considering how terrific and natural he was in last year’s genuinely heartfelt and refreshingly unfussy children’s film, Pete’s Dragon. (For their part, the adults in the movie don’t have a ton to do, though Moore is, of course, eminently watchable as ever.)

There’s also a scene in the movie, just after Ben has arrived in New York City and spills out onto 8th Avenue, that is stained by a troubling exoticism. Haynes composes shot after pondering shot of black people going about their day, as if they, too, are dioramas in a museum. Perhaps for a boy from Minnesota first encountering all this racial diversity, the presence of non-white people would come as something of a disorienting shock. But playing here in largely white Cannes, in 2017, the scene is discomfitingly othering, insensitive, and almost leering. The presence of a non-white supporting character—a new and helpful friend for Jamie—does little to make up for that unfortunate sequence.

So, that’s what I don’t like. But here’s what is great about the movie: Carter Burwell’s utterly captivating, wholly necessary score. It’s the true star of Wonderstruck, a strange and varied piece of work, swells of orchestral strings giving way to electric guitar, alternately soaring and lilting. Haynes heavily, and smartly, relies on the music to take us to grand emotional places, and the film is at its best when it lets itself be swept up in the majesty and mystery of Burwell’s compositions. These are the moments when one sincerely feels struck by an enveloping wonder—how marvelous, that light and sound can still transport us so—before the film grows sticky and dismayingly uninspiring once more. It’s perhaps a cruel irony that a movie about deafness is most ennobled by what we hear.