At this point, there must be as many “reimaginings” of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories as there have been relatively faithful retellings of the source materials themselves.

In part, this is because Barrie’s characters, like Grimms’ Fairy Tales, have been so memetically portrayed by Disney that many people forget how dark their original tales actually were.

But I suspect it also owes to how many facets there are to the Peter Pan mythos, to the extent that everyone sees something different in them. Asking someone what they like best about Peter Pan is a sort of Rorschach test that tells you more about who they are than who the character of Peter Pan might be.

It makes sense, then, that director and co-screenwriter Benh Zeitlin would deliver such a revisionary take on Peter Pan with “Wendy,” which gives us a black Peter Pan and a Wendy Darling who’s the true driving protagonist of the narrative, in a well-intentioned effort to open up Barrie’s Edwardian-era tales of adventure for English school boys, so boys and girls around the world can see themselves taking part in those adventures.

That being said, this is an incredibly American take on Peter Pan, with the Darling family updated from a middle-class London household to an American Southern single mother raising her rambunctiously grubby kids in the bedrooms above the whistle-stop greasy spoon diner she runs during the day.

Likewise, rather than pixie dust, the Darling children are transported to Peter’s Neverland, a Hawaiian-flavored volcanic island that is never named in this adaptation, by hopping onboard a night train, their ragamuffin clothes lending them a passing resemblance to the rail-riding hobos of the Great Depression.

Yashua Mack displays the right mix of personality traits to play Peter, whom Barrie himself wrote as an endlessly self-confident catalyst for exciting adventures, who’s nonetheless capable of shockingly thoughtless acts of cruelty, while Devin France’s Wendy can set her jaw sternly enough, and turn her Fremen blue-on-blue eyes steely enough, that one could easily imagine her playing the girlhood version of Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling.

Zeitlin is sufficiently clear-eyed about the inherent darkness of Barrie’s material that “Wendy” doesn’t take long to turn sinister, as we learn the fate of former Lost Boys (and girls) who have succumbed to their sorrows, dwelling in the barely habitable ruins of buildings, mired in barren fields covered in volcanic ash.

Like the Asphodel Meadows of the ancient Greek underworld, they’re mediocre souls reduced to neutral shades, losing their memories of who they used to be.

And like the “onlies” in the original series Star Trek episode “Miri,” once the bloom of youth starts to fade, decrepitude catches up with them fast, in a way that’s chillingly unsettling to watch.

And no, you won’t be surprised when one of those former Lost Boys rises up to lead his fellows in a predatory quest to reclaim what they’ve lost, fashioning himself a jagged hook to catch his prey.

Much like the epilogue Barrie wrote four years after the premiere of his original 1904 Peter Pan stage play, “Wendy” delivers a deeply bittersweet ending, acknowledging that youth lost can never be recaptured, but also calling attention to all the adventures that adulthood has to offer.

Speaking as a lifelong Peter Pan fan, this is a distinctive retelling worth watching.