The coming of age tale of two boy-men, Chris and Paul Weitz's About A Boy is a pleasant springtime charmer. It pairs Hugh Grant with newcomer Nicholas Hoult and risks having the boy outshine the man, or else torpedo the film. Luckily, the Weitzs instead manage to adapt Nick Hornby's best-selling source novel and celebrate a dual hero where both Grant and Hoult shine.

The story begins with Will Freeman (Grant), a lifelong bachelor and skirt-chaser who lives off the royalties of one of his father's ridiculous Christmas songs. He's a selfish, kept man, but not a bad one. More a loafer caught up in satisfying his various longing with nothing more complex than the next good time.

Stumbling into the divorced woman dating pool, he finds a target rich environment. Worming his way into a support group for divorced parents, he lacks only the requisite broken marriage and child so he invents a two-year old boy and starts making time with the ladies. Namely, he meets Suzie (Victoria Smurfit) and it's here where Will's story overlaps with the world of young Marcus (Hoult), the 12-year old son of Fiona (Toni Collette) who is one of Suzie's troubled hippie friends.

After Fiona makes a suicide attempt, Marcus forms an attachment to Will because he precociously understands the value of affection that Will desperately ignores. Thereafter, misadventures ensue and Marcus forms a loving, if reluctant, friendship with Will.

Eventually, he also falls for a rough-talking high school girl named Ellie (Nat Gastiain Tena) while Will meets Rachel (Rachel Weisz) with whom he falls immediately, and irrevocably, head-over-heels in love. But because their romance is based on a lie about Will being Marcus's father, the relationship founders before a happy ending resurrects it and brings all the film's loose ends together for a Christmas meal.

Featuring smart voice-over work from Will and Marcus, a fluid editing scheme relying on slow camera movements rather than cross-cutting techniques and a few over-the-top sentimental stabs, About A Boy serves up a winning comedy-drama centered on our modern concerns about space, place and family. Produced by Tim Bevan, Robert De Niro, Brad Epstein, Eric Fellner and Jane Rosenthal, it's a pleasant little movie with wonderful observations about disconnected people, materialism and the realities of family in the fractured world of today. Thus, it emphasizes Hillary Clinton's recent message of, "it takes a village", to raise modern children, especially as is evidenced in the film's closing shot featuring multiple family groups, though none of them nuclear.

Not a political treatise, per say, About A Boy shows people longing for connection and finding it in the unlikeliest places. Naturally there's room for broad comedy and some unexpectedly sharp moments. Yet the overall effect is a pleasant confection in this season of special effects extravaganzas and escapist epics.