n a love letter to analog filmmaking, writer/director Garth Jennings’s (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) semi-autobiographical Son of Rambow follows the burgeoning relationship between a pair of British schoolboys: the oppressed-by-evangelicals, Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and the charismatically unbound grifter and miscreant, Lee Carter (Will Poulter). Subsequently, Stallone-worship, zealot courtship, self-reflexiveness, poignancy, pathos, and cinematic endeavour ensue. The result is a fabulously imaginative and sweetly funny meditation on friendship and art.

Brought together by happenstance and a shared love of Rambo, the pint-sized utilitarian auteurs create the titular short film, ostensibly to enter a contest and, more importantly, to escape the strife of fractured home lives and everyday childhood dilemmas (i.e. schoolyard squabbles and parental short fallings). Like Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, Proudfoot and Carter re-imagine (aka “Swede”) a well-known film; in this case: First Blood. However, unlike Gondry’s film, …Rambow is buoyed by a powerful conceit: the imagination of children.

Shot in and around Hertfordshire and Kent, England, Jennings and, concordantly, his protagonists/surrogates, utilize their deceptively diverse surroundings to the hilt, turning rundown remnants of industrialization and a pastoral countryside into battlefields. Furthermore, props and fancy transform pinecones into grenades, scarecrows into villains, and dogs into dive-bombers.

A period piece, the ‘80s setting is an important tool; its technological limitations force ingenuity upon the protagonists while giving them a visceral connection to their work that strengthens and coincides with the emotional undercurrent. Jennings, art director, Robyn Paiba, and production designer, Joel Collins, have employed ‘80s-style effects, thus retaining believability while creating a-fanciful universe. Also, spot-lit minutiae – from crayon markings on a fishbowl to poorly timed beard trimming – accentuates the heightened awareness of childhood and, thus, ups the emotional resonance. Also, jJuxtaposing the neutral-to-dark palettes of Proudfoot’s puritan existence with the vibrancy of his imagination and, later, his film, highlights the importance of artistic expression.