Instead, the sun-drenched grounds of the base-a zone at once foreboding, charmed, and humming with sex-are a metaphor for the predicament of the American teen-agers who live there with their parents. But the first four episodes of the series display an almost swaggering lack of interest in military politics. The year is 2016 at times, we glimpse, on television screens in cafeterias and living rooms, news reports of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Guadagnino, a location fetishist, has set “We Are Who We Are” on a U.S. Army base in Chioggia, where Sarah has been named commander. Like Timothée Chalamet’s Elio, Fraser is filmed with an elegiac appreciation for his youthful, gangly limbs and pale skin. Guadagnino’s affecting adaptation of André Aciman’s gay coming-of-age love story, “ Call Me by Your Name,” made him an unlikely favorite among American teens, and his first foray into television revisits similarly languorous terrain. The object of his curiosity, Caitlin Poythress (Jordan Kristine Seamón), shoots him a knowing look-and, in that teasing moment, the true subject of “We Are Who We Are” comes into focus. There is something unnerving about him, the way he digs his dirty fingers into a cake given to his family as a welcome to their new Italian home, and leans against a wall at his new high school, mouth half open, surreptitiously photographing another student. Fraser, withdrawn and pouty, moves with an exaggerated physical unease.

Should we be disturbed? A viewer might ready herself for a study of the out-of-control American male. Sarah, knowing her son, nurses him with the nip of alcohol he demands. His mother, Sarah ( Chloë Sevigny), and her wife, Maggie (Alice Braga), are vaguely embarrassed but unfazed. In the pilot of Luca Guadagnino’s HBO drama, “We Are Who We Are,” Fraser Wilson, played by Jack Dylan Grazer, is already jumpy, in designer leopard-print fleece shorts, but now his behavior builds to a tantrum in an Italian airport, as he combs his painted nails through a lock of bleached hair. The airline may as well have run off with one of his limbs. The luggage of a stylish New York City boy of fourteen has been sent to the wrong destination.

We are who we are fraser