Japanese road movies are many; ones featuring high school kids, relatively few. One was Daigo Matsui's 2015 "Our Huff and Puff Journey," about four high school girls in Fukuoka who set off on their commuter bikes to see a concert in Tokyo.
The premise of Satoru Hirohara's "Dawn Wind in My Poncho" is similarly wacky, if with male leads: Three high school seniors take a trip to find the long-missing father of one. Along the way they meet a "gravure idol" (model for racy photos) and a "fashion health" (oral sex) shop employee. Wild, drunken revels ensue.
If you think this sounds about as probable as aliens landing on the roof of the Diet building, you are not alone. But based on Kazumasa Hayami's eponymous novel, the film is perceptive about the passages of adolescence and the vagaries of life on the road. Its journey may not be yours, but it happens to be funny and sad in ways familiar to anyone who was once a hormone-crazed teenage boy given sobering raps across the knuckles by reality.