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“White Bird” begins with Julian at an elite prep school in Manhattan getting a belated taste of his own medicine, courtesy of a bully telling him in the lunchroom that he’s sitting at the “loser’s table.” He feels preemptively ostracized and becomes obsessed with “fitting in” and being “normal,” which he defines as being neither “mean nor nice.” His Grandmère Sara (Helen Mirren), who’s in New York for an exhibition of her art, tells him the story that occupies most of the rest of the film’s running time, about an incident from 1942 that occurred in an Alsatian region outside of the official zone of Nazi occupation in France, but close enough to feel the creeping infiltration. The main character is fifteen-year-old Sara (Ariella Glaser), a Jewish girl whose mother and father (Olivia Ross and Ishai Golan) are in denial about their ability to escape persecution if the Nazi presence escalates, which of course it does.