Nick Hornby writes in a manner that is as scruffy and confused as life, and peppers his prose with moments of dead-on recognition. His style evokes the humanity of characters and their problems by making them agonizingly relatable and funny. The film version of his High Fidelity, which was the best picture of its year, captured the tone perfectly -- it felt loose, yet knew what it was doing, and when John Cusack talked into the camera, he didn't seem like he was rattling off blocks of text. One of the major problems of About a Boy is that the style feels too conventionally finessed, processed and polished. Instead of life tumbling from the screen, we get a smooth, knowing procession of scenes containing tumbling people. Hornby's characters want to live and breathe, but the filmmakers keep trying to smooth off their edges, and the overall effect is uneasy and kind of embarrassing.

About a Boy stars Hugh Grant as Will, a thirtysomething bachelor who does nothing for a living. His father wrote a Christmas song that ended up becoming a perennial favourite, and Will lives off the royalties. It's a comfortable existence involving a large apartment, swanky furniture, grand amounts of records, books and videos, and perfect solitude. Will is perfectly happy to live idly, wrapped up in a fantasy world of cigarettes, movies, long baths and television shows. An old friend asks him to hold her baby, and he looks as if he's cradling a smelly pet. He is told that he will end up "jobless, childless and all alone," and that suits him just fine.

Will begins a devious little scam pretending to be a single father so he can meet and bed single mothers -- he'd be good at pretending to be caring, he reckons, plus the sex would be hungry and grateful, and he'd get guilt-free break-ups when the women decide they're not ready to settle into new relationships. He attends meetings of a group called SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together). Through this group, Will winds up meeting an 11-year old kid named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), a geeky little boy who gets bullied at school for wearing unhip clothes and whose home life is marred by a depressive mother who wears moth-bitten old hippie clothes and cries at the breakfast table. The mother attempts to commit suicide, and Marcus decides he needs somewhere else to hang from time to time; he starts showing up at Will's flat after school to talk about life and game shows. It's not that Will is reliable for advice or confidence -- but he's clueless around kids, and Marcus misinterprets this as coolness.

This is a good story. At first Marcus is an annoyance to Will, and Will is frustrating to Marcus in the way he doesn't fill his void for a role model or friend. But the two get used to and learn from each other. And all this happens in a gradual, kinda silly way, as each guy's behaviour rubs off on the other, and the guys ponder each other's realities during goofy little conversations about other topics.

Many events take place over the course of the plot, but the directors of About a Boy are the Weitz brothers, who made American Pie, and they're unwilling or unable to create any kind of lifelike flow. Their filmmaking moulds an aura of soft, conventional comedy, but the material doesn't fit, and even when the Weitzes don't stray from the progression of Hornby's novel, they don't make sense of it. They end the movie with a stage performance, a bit of grandstanding, some hopeful music cues and snatches of meaningless dialogue. The film acts like it has found answers, when it's really just shifted tone because time has run out and the credits need to roll.

What keeps this movie watchable is a bunch of nice little asides that make us laugh out loud. Most of these revolve around Will and his cheeky attempts to get out of predicaments with lies, misrepresentations and convoluted excuses, and Grant is terrific in the role -- we're used to seeing him as a guy who mixes clumsiness and charm, and that's perfect for this character, who is up on culture and surface slickness but clueless about life. About a Boy does have moments that inspire smiling -- it's just that the filmmakers don't know how to add them up, and by the end it seems like pretty thin soup.

(Complete review on www.ukcritic.com)

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated "PG-13" for language and thematic elements.)