`Boy': Child actors lift New Zealand coming-of-Michael-Jackson-age film

There’s a flight taking off for New Zealand, and if you’ve never been there, I suggest you take this chance to hop aboard. It’s a flight of fancy about an 11-year-old Maori boy named “Boy”---the most devout Michael Jackson fan of ’em all.

Writer-director-co-star Taika Waititi (“Eagle vs. Shark”) sets this refreshingly gentle dramatic comedy in 1984. That (for the three of you who don’t know) would be the year of “Thriller,” when MJ was King of the World, as well as Pop, even in the backwater Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand.

Boy (James Rolleston) lives on a hardscrabble farm there with his younger brother Rocky, his beloved goat, his motley crew of orphan-cousins, and his grandmother, who has just gone away for a week, leaving Boy in charge. His mom died in childbirth with Rocky. His dad Alamein (Taika Waititi)---absent lo, the past seven years---is the object of Boy’s constant fantasizing: war hero, deep-sea diver, physical superman, escape artist, Samurai martial-arts master, close personal friend of Michael Jackson. Never mind the brutal skepticism of Boy’s friends.

Hardly has Gran departed when Alamein suddenly shows up in the actual instead of imaginary flesh, just released from jail in the company of two seedy pals---wannabe “Crazy Horse” gang members like himself. This real vs. ideal dad is a brash, bungling, hard-drinking thief who has returned to the homestead not to find his kids but the bag of money he buried there before his arrest.

Trouble is, he can’t remember exactly where he buried it.

Boy is buoyed rather than bothered by that. Daddy's tattoos! His braggadocio! His helmet and war games on the beach! Alamein, for his part, is buoyed by the discovery of marijuana plants inbetween the cornstalks. Once (and ever after) stoned, he gives Boy a hideously bad “Michael Jackson haircut” with which Boy is stuck for the rest of the movie. Homecoming presents for his children include a box of sparklers, a pair of handcuffs, and a microwave---which one of the kids thinks is a TV and tries to operate with a remote, and which Boy uses to heat up brass doorknobs.

Talk about a baaad influence---but not really a baaad guy. He’s just incredibly immature for his years, as his son is incredibly mature beyond his: The scales gradually fall from Boy’s bright, brilliant eyes.

The film is chock full of wonderful vignettes from these scruffy Maori kids’ scruffy lives. “Hey, Chardonnay!” Boy yells to that deliciously named schoolgirl of his dreams. “Wanna see some Michael Jackson dance moves?” She doesn’t, but he does them anyway---the most terrible, talentless imitation thereof. A classroom fight results in after-school detention with a lecture about fulfilling his potential. “What’s `potential’ mean?” he asks. “I’m off duty,” the teacher replies---and leaves.

This material would never work without exceptional performances from two fine child actors: James Rolleston is an unaffected, appealingly perfect Boy. Sweet-sad Te Aho Eketone-Whitu as brother Rocky believes he has magic powers---and does, as a performer: “My mom’s dead. I killed her,” he says with the stone-faced despair of uttering a simple fact.

Director-writer-co-star Waititi---a popular New Zealand standup comic in his earlier incarnation, assigns himself the key droll role of the ne’er-do-well father, who prefers to be called “Shogun” rather than Dad. He combines buffoonery with real angst, a kind of Steve Zahn in dramatic high-stoner mode.

Waititi’s script, expanded from his Oscar-nominated short film “Two Cars, One Night” (2005), is semi-autobiographical, filmed where he grew up. That "Bay of Plenty” area has beautiful natural seaside surroundings but not-so-beautiful manmade scenery in the borderline poverty-stricken villages where these Native Zealanders (and mixed Maori folks) live. Raised to be ashamed of their culture and often punished for speaking their own language, they were routinely told they were stupid, lapsed into crime, anglicized their names, left for the cities and---having lost their heritage---fell in with urban gangs as a way of belonging somewhere, to something.

In English and Maori (the former can be as tough to understand as the latter), “Boy” is a lovely example of Kiwi filmmaking: Ah, how birds without wings somehow manage to fly. Waititi’s lovely animation (of Rocky’s fantasy scenes) adds nice periodic punctuation.

This charming, low-budget, unpretentious coming-of-age tale calls to mind the naturalistic innocence of young Truffaut (remember his gorgeous “L’Argent de Poche”?) back when you could have an upbeat ending without being facile or cloying. “Boy” tugs at the heartstrings in a fresh, not formulaic, way---faraway hero-worship meets the long arm of American culture. Michael Jackson himself would have loved it---kids, animals, music, dance and fantasy!

Stick around for the nifty “postlude,” a final credits song-and-dance sequence, with more wonderfully tacky MJ imitative choreography, plus a fun final fillip.

Somebody always has to be the goat.