Borstal Boy.

* Directed by Peter Sheridan * Written by Sheridan and Nye Heron, based on the book by Brendan Behan * Starting Shawn Hatosy and Danny Dyer * Strand

"The luck of the Irish," sneers a young British recruit at a teenage Brendan Behan just after Behan's scruffy reform-school team whips the soldier's more seasoned prep-school athletes at a game of rugby.

The speaker didn't know the half of it. Based on celebrated Irish writer Behan's classic accounts of his years in the Borstal reform institution during World War II, Borstal Boy traces the peculiar luck of a 16-year-old flunky terrorist who repeatedly manages to save his neck while all those near and dear to him are losing theirs.

Getting caught may have been the luckiest thing that happened to him. Nabbed while smuggling an IRA bomb, the underage Behan (Shawn Hatosy) is spared the gallows and sentenced to four years at Borstal. He has barely recovered from resisting his first homosexual pass when he conspires with a circle of chums to flee, grunting, "I'm a prisoner of war; it's my duty to escape."

The plan fails tragically, flinging Behan back into Borstal and into the arms of love. Abetted by the naughty scribblings of Oscar Wilde and that old devil hooch, Behan loosens the shackles of his earnest political agenda and reexamines his notions of identity and manhood. As he inches closer to a tryst with the headmaster's daughter (Eva Birthistle), he is also slouching toward intimacy with the poofter sailor (Danny Dyer) he once rebuffed.

Despite the simmering homo lust and the anachronistic inclusion of a lovely, bluesy ballad by the Hothouse Flowers, Borstal Boy is a throwback to the most unabashedly old-fashioned brand of movie storytelling. Employing an emotional volatility and pictorial gloss redolent of MGM in its late-'30s heyday, director Peter Sheridan and coscreenwriter Nye Heron balance scenes of triumph and failure, violence and tenderness, humor and heartbreak with such exactitude, it feels as though they'd sifted Behan's story down to its purest elements and measured them on a jeweler's scale.

The result is as entertaining and manipulative as such a formula might promise, helped immeasurably by engaging performances from the two male leads. As the writer-to-be and his frisky mate sneak a nocturnal kiss outside the boys' dormitory, one reflects upon the millions of such stories that have not been told for want of the gift to serve them properly with words.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer for Newsday.