BLURRING THE BORDERLINE

REVIEWED - MICKYBO & MEGiven that the attraction of opposites is one of the most enduring staples in movies, it's all the more appropriate that the schoolboy protagonists of Mickybo & Me should discover common ground inside a cinema. In another time-honoured dramatic device, the two boys hail from different sides of a divide - in this case, a bridge that separates Catholics and Protestants in Belfast in 1970.

By some way the more precocious of the pair, Mickybo (John Joe McNeill) is one of five children, two of them twin girls who speak in unison. They live with their lazy, unemployed father (Adrian Dunbar), who is preoccupied with drinking and gambling, and a caring mother (Julie Walters) with infinite resources of patience. The introverted Jonjo (Niall Wright) is the only child in a dead marriage between an adulterous father (Ciaran Hinds) and a morose mother (Gina McKee).

Bombs are exploded in the city, houses are burned out and families forced to move elsewhere, but Mickybo and Jonjo are too young to understand or deal with this cruel, hate-steeped world. They escape into the fantasy of the movies, and one in particular, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paul Newman and Robert Redford's anti-heroes provide them with role models for a series of exuberant escapades into which reality inevitably intrudes.

There are intimations of this earlier on when the tone darkens and the severed finger of a bomb victim becomes a curious plaything, or when the boys discover a real gun with live bullets which they use as a toy. However, while never shirking from the fundamental seriousness of its dramatic backdrop, the movie is essentially an appealing coming-of-age that proceeds at a breezy pace until it reaches a present-day coda that feels imposed and contrived.

Making his feature film debut, writer-director Terry Loane adeptly disguises the movie's theatrical origins in Owen McCafferty's Mojo Mickybo. In 1998 Loane designed the first stage production of the play, which featured just two adult males acting out all the different roles.

Bursting with energy and winning, natural screen presence, newcomers Wright and McNeill, who have the most substantial roles in the movie, effortlessly steal scene after scene from the redoubtable adult actors. And Loane doesn't miss a trick when it comes to tapping into the camaraderie of Butch and Sundance and applying that movie's resonance to the adventures of Mickybo and Jonjo.

So, will Loane set up a freeze frame of the two young lads leaping into mid-air from a (fairly) great height? Is the Pope a Catholic? Michael Dwyer