Son of Rambow: First blood

Most filmmakers and movie buffs share childhood conversion experiences. At some point when they were young, they saw a movie that changed their lives forever, with the wattage from a film projector proving as powerful as the heavenly light that struck Paul on the road to Damascus. When the closing credits rolled, the young viewers had become lifelong adherents to the church of cinema.

In Son of Rambow, kid protagonist Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) discovers movies in an unlikely yet potent way. Will belongs to an Amish-like religious sect called the Brethren in a small English town in the early 1980s. The Brethren's beliefs prohibit Will from seeing movies of any kind, so, while his class watches educational films, he reads alone in the school corridor. His naiveté makes him easy prey for Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a classmate, ne'er-do-well and movie bootlegger.

At Lee's home, Will unwittingly watches Lee's illicit recording of that new American shoot-em-up, First Blood (1982). The introduction to Sylvester Stallone's ultraviolent Vietnam vet John Rambo overwhelms Will without traumatizing him. Bitten by the movie bug, Will insists that Lee make a film called "Son of Rambow" for a home-movie contest, with Will in the title role.

Writer/director Garth Jennings based Son of Rambow loosely on some of his own experiences as a Rambo fan coming of age in 1980s England. Jennings' bemused nostalgia for the period and eye for imaginative whimsy elevate Son of Rambow's modest charms. Tiny, squeaky Will finds endless laughs when he imitates Stallone's pumped-up, headband-wearing action hero.

Son of Rambow keeps its jokiness in line by following the emotional trajectory of Will's and Lee's off-again, on-again friendship. At first, Lee cons Will out of his belongings and forces him to be the fall guy in hilariously unsafe stunts. When Will's highly developed imagination seizes on film as an outlet, their creative partnership provides accessible and amusing metaphors for the film industry.

Will's visionary creativity and Lee's resourcefulness imitate the usual dynamic of "artistic" movie director and "deal-making" producer. You can probably find parallels in Jennings' longtime relationship with producer Nick Goldsmith, with whom he's made music videos under the banner Hammer & Tongs. When "Son of Rambow" attracts the eager attention of the school's popular kids, the production gets out of control and out of Lee's hands, a plight familiar to any fledgling filmmaker eaten up by the movie business. Fortunately, the story never feels too much like an inside joke, thanks to the scruffy appeal of the home-movie premise.

Jennings fares better with Rambow's smaller-scale production compared with his debut feature, the loving but scattershot adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). Despite the talents of the young leads, Rambow suffers from heavy-handed humor and pathos at times. To make the bullying Lee into a sympathetic figure, Jennings gives him absent parents and a nasty older brother who treats him like a servant. Rambow also overplays a running joke in which a laconic French teen (Jules Sitruk) in New Wave gear, becomes the coolest, most popular kid in school. I can only assume this is faithful to the film's time and place, since I have a hard time imagining a frail, androgynous French exchange student becoming the toast of my American high school.

Son of Rambow effectively argues that creative fantasy, particularly film, can unify people in a common cause. Some movies such as Peter Jackson's brilliant Heavenly Creatures (1994), which features partially animated flights of fancy comparable to Son of Rambow, paint fantasy as alienating and destructive. Son of Rambow takes the opposite perspective and argues that imagination and teamwork can bring people together and erase differences, even among religious fanatics and cliquish high schoolers. There may be a little Rambow in all of us.