"Son of Rambow" dusts the cliches from the coming-of-age movie with its charming account of the growing friendship between two English boys in the early 1980s, when VHS camcorders and videotape machines were the entertainment staples of the zeitgeist.

The teens are Will (a sweetly disarming Bill Milner), a soft-spoken but plucky lad forbidden by his family's religious sect to watch television, and Lee (Will Poulter), a punky kid whose volatile family life causes him to act up at school. Thrown together by circumstance, they soon realize that their teamwork (Lee enlists Will to help him make a "Rambo"-style home movie) fills an emotional void in their lives.

Movies about children are so often marketed exclusively to that age group with material that is either child-oriented or just plain juvenile or crude. But director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith (the creative team known for music videos and 2005's whimsical "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") take us into the world of children without arch pretension, pandering or condescension. They infuse this story with a crowd-pleasing combination of buoyant spirit and occasionally dark humor, as Will, Lee and a very eccentric French exchange student (Jules Sitruk) attempt to revisit Sylvester Stallone's one-dimensional machismo territory with the goofy earnestness of youth. (A war-painted Will plays the intentionally misspelled son of Rambow.) We cringe and laugh at -- and are ultimately moved by -- their clumsiness and innocence. And it endears us to the "Rambo" films in ways we never could have anticipated.

-- Desson Thomson (May 9, 2008)

Contains violence and profanity.