Editor's note: The film made its Hawai'i debut at the Spring Showcase of the Hawaii International Film Festival last month.

"Son of Rambow" is an adorable, indie-edgy kids-make-movies comedy from England, set in the 1980s, when New Wave was cresting and the camcorder became king.

It's about that coming-of-age moment when a child first falls in love with the cinema, a wacky, do-it-yourself version of "The 400 Blows." Well, that's overstating it a bit, but you get my drift.

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a fatherless elementary schooler whose life inside his mother's Luddite/neo-Amish religious cult (Plymouth Brethren) has kept him away from the pop culture of the day. He's not allowed to watch TV and is exiled to the school hallways any time the class is to view an educational documentary.

Even though the closest he's ever been to a cinema is reading Bible verses to "save" the sinners buying tickets to "First Blood," he has a vivid imagination. He draws comics and fantasizes a world of action and magical creatures and a search for his lost (dead) dad.

Lee Carter (Will Poulter) is his polar opposite. He smokes. He teases, taunts, shoplifts and bootlegs new movies like "First Blood." He blackmails poor Will into helping him make his "movie."

Lee Carter, always addressed by first and last names, wants to win the BBC's young filmmaker's screen test. And since the only movie Will has seen was Lee Carter's pirate copy of "First Blood," Will vows to play "Son of Rambow," and proceeds to storyboard, script and play the lead in Lee Carter's movie.

The stunts are wacky and dangerous and seriously DIY — ketchup for blood, see-saw catapult jumps, kites for "flying dogs," and the like. The stunts go wrong more often than not, making us fear for poor Will's safety.

"I'm all right, Lee Carter!"

The costumes are "Rambo"-on-a-budget, the acting uneven, as the lads enlist elderly patients at Lee Carter's family rest-home for bit parts.

But Lee Carter is an unpopular, unhappy lad, basically a slave to his not-much-older brother, and hated in school. He's even unhappier when Will lets their film get hijacked by all the popular kids who are keen to hang out with the super-cool French exchange student, Didier (Jules Sitruk, an Adam Ant look-alike and a hoot).

After forming an informal band of apostles and teaching all the girls in school to French kiss, Didier is bored. He wants to be a movie star. He will do their movie with them, yes?

Will, almost drunk with the experience of having seen his first-ever movie, fantasizes hand-animated versions of the movie's "rescue Dad" story. Lee Carter puts on the tough, loner filmmaker pose like an 11-year-old Tarantino.

"Parents? You're pretty much better off without 'em. That's what I say."

Lee Carter's complaint that he liked making their movie better when it was just him and Will filming it applies to "Son of Rambow," too. "Hammer and Tongs," the music video team of director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, who mucked up the big-screen "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," atone for their sins with this writing-directing comeback. But the film turns cluttered, unfocused and even sappy in its last third.

Sweet and sentimental, a bit racy to be a kids' film, a bit tame as grown-up entertainment, "Son of Rambow" is still a small miracle of a romp about childhood discovery and the birth of a lifelong love of the movies.

And the greatest miracle of it all may be that all this was inspired by Sylvester Stallone.