Starring Bill Milner and Will Poulter. Rated PG. Opens Friday, May 16, at the Park Theatre

I don’t know very much about British director Garth Jennings except that he made the not-very-good movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and that he was 10 in 1982.

By a strange coincidence, the latter fact is also true of the main character in his new Son of Rambow, which he also wrote. Bill Milner, who resembles the little boy in Witness, plays Will Proudfoot, stranded in rural Hertfordshire, England, with no father, a vivid imagination, and a family wrapped up in religious weirdness. As a scrawny, artistic outsider, he is almost accidentally drawn to a school bully (Will Poulter) with daddy issues of his own, although the bigger kid does have access to a primitive Betacam. Inspired by First Blood, currently playing at the local cinema, the two team up to stage a rough remake of their own. (That “w” might be there for legalistic reasons, but some clips of Sly Stallone are seen here.)

This Rambow is filled with distracting, mostly pointless subplots, allowing the director to indulge in generally impressive special effects, as well as the flock-of-haircuts nostalgia you’d expect from an ’80s-set tale. This is undermined by certain grinding modernisms (such as kids who yell out “Skills!” as if they are in Napoleon Dynamite), and along with the air of general excess, there are whiffs of John Hughes and other randomly used American influences, such as a score seemingly lifted from The Simpsons.

Scenes of the lads’ finished filmlet, although generally amusing in their own right (thanks to the charm of the child actors), come out like outtakes from Be Kind Rewind. Anyway, you have to wonder what would have happened if they had seen Yentl instead.