‘Rambow’ uses quirky charm

By Colin Covert

The young actors are engaging and controlled.

“Son of Rambow,” a joyous, touching story of friendship, mischief and imagination set in 1980s England, gives us two boys of wildly different temperaments drawn together by the love of films.

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a lonely schoolboy with a widowed fundamentalist mother (Jessica Stevenson) and an artistic imagination, fills his Bible with fantastic crayon drawings of flying dogs and monstrous scarecrows. Although Will’s faith forbids him to watch movies or TV — he’s pushed forward to read scripture at a prayer vigil outside the local cinema — he draws animated flip-book cartoons. He’s never experienced moving pictures, but intuitively understands their escapist magic.

Inside the picketed cinema, Lee Carter (Will Poulter), the school hooligan, puffs on a cigarette and casually copies Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo rampage in “First Blood” with a briefcase-sized VHS camcorder. When Lee shows Will his pirated movie, it’s like a jolt of rocket fuel for the sheltered boy’s imagination. Joining forces to make a feature length video for a BBC young filmmaker competition, the pair discovers that while they’re emotional opposites, they’re a natural team. Lee is bullying where Will is timid, and bottom-line oriented where Will is given to flights of fancy. In other words, Lee is a born film producer to Will’s instinctive writer-director-star.

Their project is “Son of Rambow,” in which the action icon’s kid sets out to rescue him from evildoers. It’s more than an excuse for the boys to put on homemade costumes, smear themselves with mud and tear around the countryside on imaginative adventures. Their home movie also becomes a vehicle for both boys to work out their absent-father issues. Lee lives under the care of his neglectful teenage brother while his mom is away on a semi-permanent European vacation. Unlike his new friend, who chafes under excessive control, Lee suffers from none. Like the grieving Will, he sees Stallone’s can-do hero as the male authority figure he has been craving.

The bond between the boys is tested when a ludicrously cool teenage French exchange student inserts himself in their epic as a master ninja. Didier (Jules Sitruk) is ennui incarnate in pointy red ankle boots. He threatens to hijack the production and sunder their friendship, while the harebrained stunts they stage for the big climax turn dangerous.

Writer-director Garth Jennings (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy”) deftly juggles serious themes and rambunctious comedy in a way that deepens both, never stumbling into facile Hollywood sentimentality. He’s a great director of performers, too. The young actors are marvelously engaging and controlled, considering that neither Poulter nor Milner has acted before. Their adventures are unique, but their coming-of-age experiences are universal.