FAR OUT, MAN

REVIEWED -  BREAKFAST ON PLUTO Cillian Murphy is wonderful as an innocent abroad in Neil Jordan's funny and tender drama, writes Michael Dwyer

BREAKFAST on Pluto marks another rich, stimulating blending of Patrick McCabe's wonderfully weird and fertile imagination and Neil Jordan's rich cinematic flair after their fruitful collaboration on The Butcher Boy. At the heart of the new film is a quite extraordinary performance from the versatile and adventurous Cillian Murphy as one of life's pure innocents, Patrick Braden, who's plunged into a whirlwind of events that are, by turn, uproariously funny and dramatically jolting.

The unplanned offspring of a priest (Liam Neeson) and his housekeeper (Eva Birthistle), Patrick grows up during the 1960s in the fictional Irish border town of Tyreleen. To the exasperation of his adoptive mother (Ruth McCabe), he exhibits far more interest in wearing dresses and make-up than in football. In his teens Patrick adopts the name of Kitten and sets off on a quest for his birth mother. He finds an unlikely romantic protector in Billy Rock (Gavin Friday), leader of a glitter band, The Mohawks.

In a movie packed with resonantly employed period pop music (Breakfast on Pluto takes its title from a 1969 hit single by busker Don Partridge), the musical highlight is the surreal on-stage duet between Kitten (in Indian squaw costume) and Billy Rock on the Nancy Sinatra-Lee Hazlewood torch song, Sand.

Moving to London, the naive Kitten's encounters include a hard-drinking Irish emigrant (Brendan Gleeson) who gets him a job in a Wombles of Wimbledon theme park; a sinister kerb-crawler (singer Bryan Ferry); a morose magician (Stephen Rea) who saws Kitten in half on stage; and an aggressive detective (Ian Hart) investigating an IRA pub bombing.

In the tradition of Candide, Kitten is an eternal optimist whose good nature is rewarded in the unexpectedly beautiful and moving resolution. The film artfully weds preoccupations familiar from Jordan's earlier work - terrorism, cross-dressing, inter-racial relationships, lost parents, musicians, fairytales - in an intoxicating fusion that amply justifies the willing suspension of disbelief.

The large cast, which also notably features Ruth Negga and Laurence Kinlan as Kitten's friends from childhood, is admirable - from Murphy's marvellous immersion in the "svelte gamine" that is Kitten to Tom Hickey's ripe delivery of his single line as a bothered bishop.