The Boys are Back

12a / Scott Hicks / 2009 / The Boys are Back / USA
Based on Simon Carr's popular memoir. The Boys are Back is a funny, anarchic and, above all, moving confessional drama about modern family life – complicated, fractured but still with great possibilities for love and joy. Clive Owen is Joe Warr, a wisecracking writer whose wife dies suddenly, leaving him to bring up their six-year-old son alone. In the midst of this arrives Harry, Joe's teenage son from his first marriage, who brings his own personal baggage into the mix. Joe decides the best way forward is least-resistance parenting, and introduces a 'just say yes' maxim. In a house devoid of feminine influence, with a cultivated lack of rules and deep emotion swirling below the surface, life becomes exhuberant, instinctive, reckless… and potentially disastrous.