Son of Rambow (2008)

Directed by Garth Jennings. Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jessica Stevenson, Neil Dudgeon, Jules Sitruk, Ed Westwick. Paramount Vantage.

By Steven D. Greydanus

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) first meet in the school corridor one day when neither is in class. Lee is in the corridor because he’s a young hooligan who’s been thrown out of the classroom. Will is in the corridor because his science class is watching a documentary videotape, and his ultra-conservative religious persuasion — Plymouth Brethren — doesn’t permit him to watch movies or television. The next day both boys are out in the same corridor again, for the same reasons.

There’s a Darwinian ruthlessness in the events that follow as Lee remorselessly bullies, cons and domineers Will, who’s so sheltered and isolated (turns out fish in a barrel are easier to shoot) that he doesn’t even understand that he’s being abused, and before long Will comes to regard Lee as a friend. Yet the two boys have more in common than first appears, and zero-sum attrition is ultimately not the final word on their relationship.

After making his feature debut with the rather inspiration-challenged big-screen Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, director Garth Jennings wisely shifts to a more intimate and personal canvas with Son of Rambow, a quirky British indie, set in the early 1980s, that made a splash at Sundance. Although somewhat scattered and uneven, Rambow has enough heart and wit to sustain its 96-minute running time.

Both Will and Lee live inside their heads, and seek creative outlet in image-making. Lee’s inner world is populated by mainstream culture images and icons, such as Sly Stallone’s hero John Rambo in First Blood, which Lee pirates with a clunky camcorder at a theater screening. Will, of course, has never experienced anything like that, but at Lee’s house he has an electrifying encounter with those contraband images of Stallone battling law-enforcement officials in the mountain wilderness of Washington State.

Read the full review on Friday, May 4 at Christianity Today Movies

Some bullying, shoving and such as well as fantasy combat; children engaging in various physically dangerous and otherwise irresponsible actions, from smoking and shoplifting to playing in a hazardous industrial area and performing dangerous stunts; some crass language and a few instances of profanity; a scene in which two characters deliberately cut their palms to become “blood brothers.”