Make believe. Not war.

In theaters Friday: Battle: Los Angeles, Jane Eyre, Red Riding Hood

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Morning Glory, The Next Three Days, Inside Job

After seeing a sluggish, though fairly accurately awarded Oscar show last weekend, I wanted to watch a movie that celebrated the process of filmmaking in a much more innocent and heartfelt way. Maybe a film that said something about life and the nobility of friendships through hardships and the creative pursuits of growing up. Enter: Son of Rambow.

Helmed by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy director Garth Jennings, Son of Rambow uses drama and comedy, much like Stand By Me or Rushmore do to great effect, to look at youth through a set of creatively rose-tinted glasses. Set in the early 1980s England, Son of Rambow follows two outcast schoolboys on a quest to film their own movie inspired by the original Rambo adventure First Blood. Will Proudfoot and Lee Carter could not be more different. Will and his mother belong to a strict Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, who, like the Amish, avoid modern technology, movies, music and television. When his class watches documentaries, Will is excused to leave the room. While waiting in the hall one day, Will meets troublemaking movie bootlegger Lee and the pair accidentally break a large fish bowl. Used to being reprimanded, Lee agrees to take the fall if meek Will agrees to take some real falls as the stuntman and co-star of the action movie Lee is shooting at home with his bullying brother’s camcorder and ketchup for fake blood.

Keeping his new friend and movie project a secret from his mother, Will begins sneaking around with Lee as they attempt dangerous stunts and attract a string of classmates who want to take part in the growing epic that is Son of Rambow. Soon the cast includes foreign exchange student Didier Ravel, an ultra cool Parisian who dresses like he just stepped out of a Prince video and talks like a French dub of Dirty Harry. He may be a punch line back home, but Didier arrives in the UK like Ziggy Stardust to instant stardom on campus. All three are young boys who just want to belong, to find their niche and their band of brothers. Though none appear to crave any particular community connection in the beginning, the highs and lows of their movie project bring this longing out in each of them.

Jennings does well in depicting the dark oddities and non sequitur personalities that can populate high school life. Everything is an extreme. The vintage school walls are both beautiful and imposing, the teachers are stuffy and distant but strict, the cliques and clans of young boys and girls are aggressively precocious and naďve. The common room of the 6th Form (read: senior class) is a jungle weed of New Wavers and misfits, pseudo-intellectuals and cigarette smoke. Watching Will and Lee enter this other world feels like Dorothy stepping out of her sepia-toned home and into the bizarre colors of Oz.

What would a coming-of-age story be without a huge falling out and a subsequent reconciliation? As Will, Lee and Didier wrestle for control of their movie and their emerging preteen angst, Son of Rambow—both the film and the film-within-the-film—hits these notes in surprisingly moving ways. These young guys set out to learn about filmmaking but end up learning even more about themselves.