Sportswriter Joe (Clive Owen, centre) plays single parent to Harry (George MacKay, left) and Artie (Nicholas McAnulty) in The Boys Are Back. (Matt Nettheim/Maple Pictures)In her emotional 1980s ballad about childbirth, This Woman's Work, Kate Bush sang of "the craft of the father." The implication was that fatherhood is a practical, necessary job, but one that requires some skill. In director Scott Hicks's gentle new heart-tugger, The Boys Are Back, absentee dad Joe Warr (Clive Owen) has yet to master that craft.

Joe is a top newspaper sportswriter who left behind an ex-wife and young son in the U.K. to marry an Australian, Katy (Laura Fraser), and build a new life Down Under. When we meet him, he, Katy and their child, six-year-old Artie (Nicholas McAnulty), are living in a funky cottage in rural South Australia. Although prodigal Joe doesn't seem to be there much; he just pops in periodically between sporting assignments to charm the wife and kid.

Beneath its joyfully puerile hijinks, The Boys Are Back is a quietly intelligent film about a man growing into fatherhood, portrayed with admirable delicacy by Clive Owen.

Then one evening during a social function, Katy collapses. It turns out her body is riddled with cancer. After her death, Joe is devastated – and ill-equipped for his new role as a single father. Katy's mother, Barbara (Julia Blake), wants to take Artie off his hands, but Joe insists on keeping his son. In a recklessness born of grief and fed by his own lack of parenting skills, Joe decides to indulge Artie's every whim to keep the both of them happy.

Before long, father and son are engaging in indoor soccer matches and water-bomb battles, when Artie isn't riding on the hood of his dad's Land Rover to the anger and dismay of onlookers. (That gleeful stunt, the movie's opening scene, is a thumb in the eye to today's paranoid parenting.) In their kitchen, which looks like the aftermath of a tsunami, Joe has stuck his new mantra in magnetic letters on the fridge: "Just say yes."

That philosophy is tested when Harry (George MacKay), Joe's older son, arrives from England to spend belated bonding time with his dad. A sensitive teenager, Harry is old enough to realize there's something awry in his father's anything-goes attitude, but still enough of a kid that he soon succumbs to the allure of this Oz Neverland. Joe, meanwhile, begins to show the strain of living in perpetual chaos. Finally, his dodging of responsibility has its consequences when he tries to cover the Australian Open tennis tournament in far-off Melbourne. In what turns out to be a spectacular lapse of judgment, he ends up imperiling first his job and then the safety of his two sons.

Joe (Clive Owen, right) tries to raise Artie without rules in The Boys Are Back. (Matt Nettheim/Maple Pictures)The story is based on Simon Carr's 2000 memoir, The Boys Are Back in Town, adapted and fictionalized by Allan Cubitt. Australian filmmaker Hicks is still best known for his 1996 hit Shine and he gives this uplifting material the same elegant treatment. Beneath its joyfully puerile hijinks is a quietly intelligent film about a man growing into fatherhood, portrayed with admirable delicacy by Clive Owen.

After a string of roguish roles – in the comedy thriller Duplicity, the dramatic thriller The International and as Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabeth: The Golden Age – Owen reminds us that he's more than just the thinking woman's beefcake. He downplays Joe's laddish side, emphasizing the loving but stubborn aspects of his nature. His grief at his wife's death is truly moving – in stoic masculine style, he tries to hold it back, only to have it seep out abruptly.

Owen also has a genuine rapport with his underage co-stars. McAnulty's shaggy-haired Artie, looking like one of the Lost Boys, is a lovable little scapegrace. (His favourite bedtime read, not surprisingly, is Peter Pan.) MacKay's Harry, wide-eyed and wary, embodies the moodiness and fragility, but also the perspicacity, of adolescence.

Carr's book was bent on delineating the differences between male and female parents, but the film takes a more conciliatory approach to the women. Mother-in-law Barbara only opposes Joe out of natural concern for her grandchild. Young mom Laura (the Botticelli-faced Emma Booth), whose daughter becomes pals with Artie, provides a more stable example of single parenting – and a possible love interest for Joe.

Hicks excels at high-toned sentiment, and the picture is a class act all the way, from the gleaming endless-summer cinematography of Greig Fraser (who also shot Bright Star) to the lush songs by avant-garde Icelandic band Sigur Ros. There is no cheap manipulation of our feelings – Hicks respects his audience as much as his fondly drawn characters. With The Boys Are Back, he has crafted a tender ode to fathers and sons that still echoes after you leave the theatre.

The Boys Are Back opens in Toronto on Sept. 25 and in Montreal and Vancouver on Oct. 2.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.