Misfits, mates in joyful 'Son of Rambow'

(B) For much of its frolicsome, rambling running-time, Son of Rambow is like a guarana-spiked soft drink: It goes down easy and delivers a kick. Set in provincial England in the mid-1980s, this tale of a schoolboy with the pulpy name Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), who falls prey at age 11 to the visceral power of movies, carries the audience along on a comic rush of unexpected incidents through its entire first half and even for parts of its sappy denouement.

You can't accuse the writer-director, Garth Jennings, of burying the lead: Right at the movie's start, Will, part of a religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren, prays outside a cinema showing Rambo: First Blood, while inside, a young troublemaker named Lee Carter (Will Poulter) duplicates it on a camcorder.

The Brethren doesn't permit its flock to see movies, watch television or listen to radio and records. So when the two boys bond in the aftermath of a fight and the fundamentalist Will ends up viewing the duped First Blood in tough little Lee's home workroom, the surge of action overwhelms him.

Will responds to the spectacle of the super-fierce Rambo defeating 200 normal American fighting men the way early movie audiences did when they saw a cowboy point a gun straight at them: He bursts out of the room screaming and can't get it out of his head.

A fantasist with a notebook full of illustrated stories, Will writes and in effect storyboards an epic called Son of Rambow - and joins forces with Lee, who has just begun filming his own epic for an amateur filmmaking contest.

These unlikely buddies - and the uproarious, unexpected rightness of Rambo becoming a conflicted fundamentalist's idol - trigger what Mad magazine used to call "humor in a jugular vein."

Rambo functioned as a can-do American fantasy figure for the Reagan '80s, but go back to First Blood, and his character was ruled not by social-political score-settling but desperation over a false arrest. Will, jailed by his family's orthodoxy and aching for his father (who died of an aneurysm while mowing the lawn), is youthful desperation incarnate. He generates empathy as well as laughs when he mirrors the Rambo trajectory of an ordinary man with extraordinary guts and prowess, transmuting his stoic anxieties into sweeping action.

Milner superbly conveys how Will's escapism boasts a purity of belief that he lacks in his religious practice. When he swings over a river on a rope, though he doesn't know how to swim, he testifies to the power of belief - his open-faced ardor becomes irresistible to his grooviest schoolmates. The In Crowd may view him as the Next Big Thing, but it also responds to the originality and vitality that come flying out of him.

Milner's Will and Poulter's Lee present opposite pictures of youth's invincibility. Lee lives in the incongruously glitzy back quarters of a seedy senior-citizen care center (his mother married the absentee owner, who took her with him to Spain). This boy covers his need for fraternal affection and respect with reckless wit and spunk worthy of the young Mickey Rooney in one of his smart-aleck roles. The way Poulter plays him, Lee's fearless humor protects him like an invisible shield, which he gradually extends to Will. They become blood brothers, and why not? They share the same movie madness in the blood.

Lee's burgeoning positive feelings and Will's catalytic creativity (which writer-director Jennings often expresses in lightning flashes of animated doodling) offer emotional refreshment as well as seriocomic adrenaline. And when Jennings adds a new element to his warlock's brew, his inventiveness seems infinite. A busload of French foreign-exchange students arrives bearing an androgynous-looking fellow named Didier Revol (Jules Sitruk), in red zippered boots and a red mesh shirt. Didier strikes the uniformed British school kids (male and female) as the height of Euro chic. His blase pose as a punk-Gallic icon in a stuffy English academy is as droll as his male-diva hamminess. He decides to co-star in Will and Lee's Son of Rambow as a woodland mystic martial artist named the Wolf.

Unfortunately, the ensuing smart yet shallow humor dilutes the movie's core. And Jennings lets his movie get even farther away from him when he veers into repetitive domestic melodrama: A smug, orthodox member of the Brethren courts Will's mother and threatens Will. Jennings could have dramatized (or better yet, satirized) the shifting loyalties of friends and family without stringing all the action out.

Luckily, even when the film loses its focus, it never entirely loses its wit; Jennings delivers a satisfying payoff to Didier with a rousing comeuppance that demonstrates how the glamour of youth can dull with the simplest change of context. Son of Rambow is half a great movie. At its best, it is a comic epic for half-pints.

>>>Son of Rambow ( Paramount Vantage) Starring Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jules Sitruk. Directed by Garth Jennings. Rated PG-13 for some violence and reckless behavior. Time 96 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

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