Son of Rambow

Starring: Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Adam Godley, Ed Westwick, Jules Sitruk, Natalie Hallam, Charlie Thrift, Eric Sykes, Zofia Brooks

Written by: Garth Jennings

Directed by: Garth Jennings

Distributor: Paramount Vantage

Rated: PG-13

Nearly two years after the critical disaster that was the huge-budget Hollywood adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, British Director Garth Jennings pasted together a small-budget film that quite nearly atoned for his work on the Walt Disney mega-turkey. With a tiny cast of virtually no-ones working on an extremely small scale, Jennings follows up a large-scale misstep with a brilliant work of independent cinema.

In the haze of the early 1980s, a primary school boy named Will (Bill Milner) struggles with acceptance amongst his peers. His family belongs to an ultra-conservative Christian sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. Thanks to Brethren doctrine, Will is not allowed to watch television, go to the cinema or even listen to the radio. After a particularly rough day at school, the imaginative, artistic Will finds himself falling in with an irreverent misfit named Carter (Will Poulter). Will’s social world is instantly transformed as Carter becomes his first real friend – and when he discovers a bootleg video of Rambo: First Blood. Carter and Will join forces to create a video tribute to the now-classic action flick.

Will and Carter face classic difficulties in filmmaking: scheduling problems, budget concerns and safety issues all play out on a grade-school level. When a popular French foreign exchange student (played with sophisticated precision by Jules Sitruk) asks to be in the film, Will and Carter suddenly find themselves dealing with the difficulties inherent in employing a big-name star.

The Son of Rambow’s textbook Hollywood plot structure doesn’t offer any surprises, but with sheer exuberance, the film derives its almost-limitless joy from the passion that draws people to cinema in the first place. Poulter and Milner prove to be consummate professionals, carving compelling performances from Jennings’ cunningly simple script. There may be very little here beyond a simple love for film, but it proves to be far more than enough to keep it together. VS