This loosely autobiographical quasi-coming-of-age tale from Garth Jennings, half of music-video production team Hammer & Tongs and the director of the unwieldy but fitfully amusing Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feature, is crammed tight with every kid-pic cliché you can imagine. It starts with the unlikely friendship of imaginative loner Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and village tough Lee Carter (Will Poulter), then quickly becomes one of those movies about the making of a bad movie — the titular “Son of Rambow,” which is inspired by a bootleg videotape of First Blood shot by Lee at the local cinema. While Will has been raised in a straight-laced religious sect that forbids TV and movies, Lee is almost his polar opposite - a rambunctious (though soft-hearted) bully given to petty larceny who nonetheless wields a primitive VHS camcorder in the hope of winning a filmmaking contest by leveraging the limited materials available to him.
Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind covers some of the same amateur-auteur
territory with considerably more panache and variety, as its
video-store denizens take a low-end pass at remaking everything from to
Ghostbusters to Rush Hour 2. By contrast, Son of Rambow is a little too
enamored with specificity of experience. Jennings can’t let go of the
Rambo movie that so infatuated him as a lad, and the parade of
playfully edgy 80s pop hits that begins with “Close to Me” by The Cure
and culminates somewhere this side of “Peek-a-Boo” by Siousxie and the
Banshees invests the movie with something that barely passes for period
flavor. And the current convention of representing a live-action
character’s inner life on screen through ostensibly whimsical animation
— happily, it’s sparingly deployed here — is quickly becoming a twee
cliche.
Part of the problem with Son of Rambow is that the tone
is too loose across the board, not just in the broadly slapstick
movie-making scenes that are the film’s highlight. The
film-within-a-film has a winning absurdity, but it doesn’t stand apart
from the bulk of the narrative material, which is already conceived,
with outsized flair and ambitious comic timing, as a sort of
live-action cartoon. Jennings makes lots of large brushstrokes, but
fails to pencil-and-ink in the kind of detail that would make his yarn
credible as the character study it often tries to be — even as he goes
off on an odd tangent about a French exchange student who tries but
fails to channel Patrick Swayze. Part Billy Elliot, part pint-sized
Rushmore, part Gilliam-esque boosterism on the value of imagination
amidst grim surroundings, Son of Rambow never finds its own voice, and
generally fails to live up to its reckless promise.
Still, the
film has its charms, including an entertaining young cast. Milner is
fine as a sweet kid who’s just starting to figure out how to interact
with the world outside of his house, but it’s the piercing,
sharp-eyebrowed gaze of Will Poulter that really gets a workout here,
as he plays the kind of boy who’s reached the crossroads of pulling
himself out of the muck and failing to give a shit. Both are fatherless
children, and as an endorsement of movies made in the margins, Son of
Rambo is a starry-eyed vision of a child’s relationship with pop
culture, citing questionable influences — like a violent Hollywood
action movie — that can nonetheless catalyze real expression. It argues for
indulging creative exuberance, rather than fretting about it. And it
advocates throwing yourself into something with disregard for its
quality or lack thereof, and trusting that it will prove to be of value
to some audience, somewhere - even if it turns out to be only an
audience of one. That’s not everything, but it’s worth something. C+