'Son of Rambow': Rediscover childhood

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

Son of Rambow is an ­adorable, indie-edgy, kids-make-movies ­comedy from England, set in the 1980s, when New Wave was ­cresting, and the camcorder ­became king.

It's about that moment when a child first falls in love with the cinema, a wacky, do-it-yourself ­version of The 400 Blows. Well, that's overstating it a bit, but you get my drift.

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a fatherless elementary schooler whose life inside his mother's Luddite/neo-Amish religious cult (Plymouth Brethren) has kept him away from pop culture. He's not allowed to watch TV.

The closest he has been to a cinema is reading Bible verses to ”save“ the sinners buying tickets to First Blood, but he has a vivid imagination. He draws comics and fantasizes a world of action and magical creatures and a search for his lost (dead) dad.

Lee Carter (Will Poulter) is his polar opposite. He smokes. He teases, taunts, shoplifts and bootlegs movies such as First Blood. He ­blackmails poor Will into helping him make his ”movie.“

Lee Carter, always ­addressed by first and last names, wants to win the BBC's young ­filmmaker's screen test. And since the only movie Will has seen was Lee Carter's ­pirate copy of First Blood, Will vows to play ”Son of Rambow,“ and proceeds to storyboard, script and play the lead in Lee Carter's movie.

The stunts are wacky and dangerous and seriously do-it-yourself — ketchup for blood, seesaw catapult jumps, kites for ”flying dogs,“ and the like. The stunts go wrong more often than not, making us fear for poor Will's safety.

The costumes are Rambo-on-a-budget and the acting uneven, as the lads enlist elderly patients at Lee Carter's family rest home for bit parts.

But Lee Carter is an unpopular, unhappy lad, basically a slave to his not-much-older brother and hated in school. He's even unhappier when Will lets their film get hijacked by popular kids keen to hang out with French exchange student Didier (Jules Sitruk, a hoot).

After forming an informal band of apostles and teaching all the girls in school to French kiss, Didier is bored. He wants to be a movie star. He will do their movie with them, yes?

Will, almost drunk with the experience of having seen his first-ever movie, fantasizes hand-animated versions of the movie's ”rescue Dad“ story. Lee Carter puts on a tough, loner filmmaker pose like an 11-year-old Tarantino.

Lee Carter's complaint that he liked making their movie better when it was just him and Will ­filming it applies to Son of ­Rambow, too. ”Hammer and Tongs,“ the team of director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, who mucked up the big-screen version of The ­Hitchhiker's Guide to the ­Galaxy, atone for their sins with this writing-­directing comeback. But the film is unfocused and sappy in its last third.

Sweet and sentimental, a bit racy to be a kids' film, a bit tame as grown-up entertainment, Son of Rambow is still a small miracle about childhood discovery and the birth of a lifelong love of the movies.

And the greatest miracle of it all might be that all this was inspired by Sylvester Stallone.