* Directed by means of Peter Sheridan * Written according to Sheridan and Nye Heron.

* Directed by means of Peter Sheridan * Written according to Sheridan and Nye Heron, based forward the book by Brendan Behan * Starting Shawn Hatosy and Danny Dyer * Strand

"The fortune 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 in succession celebrated Irish writer Behan's classic accounts of his years in the Borstal reform institution during World War II, Borstal stripling 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 sentenc to four years at Borstal. He has barely repaired from resisting his first homosexual pass when he conspires with a circle of chamber-fellow room-mates to flee, grunting, "I'm a prisoner of war; it's my service to escape."

The plan fails tragically, flinging Behan back into Borstal and into the arms of delight in Abetted by the naughty scribblings of Oscar Wilde and that advanced in years 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 assignation with the headmaster's daughter (Eva Birthistle), he is also slouching toward intimacy with the poofter sailor (Danny Dyer) he one time rebuffed.

Despite the simmering homo lust and the anachronistic inclusion of a admirable bluesy ballad by the Hothouse Flowers, Borstal stripling is a throwback to the most numerous unabashedly old-fashioned brand of movie storytelling. Employing an emotional volatility and pictorial glos redolent of MGM in its late-'30s heyday, director Peter Sheridan and coscreenwriter brood Heron balance scenes of triumph and failure, violence and tendernes humor and heartbreak with in the same state [i]or[/i] condition exactitude, it feels as nevertheless they'd sifted Behan's story down to its purest uncompounded bodys and measured them on a jeweler's scale.

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

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer for Newsday.

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