Damian Cunningham (Alexander Nathan Etel) is an eccentric child. Shortly after his mother’s untimely death, he and his older brother Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon) move with their hardworking father (the excellent James Nesbitt) to a new town and a new school. Damian is lonely and of course, too smart for his own good in the local public school. He’s a classic precocious outcast, and a lovable one with deep religious faith—indeed, he’s frequented by sweet, funny visits from the saints, often while hiding out in a cardboard fortress (expertly staged by Boyle with an attention to the magic, secret places every child cherishes) constructed near a busy railway track—his only refuge from a disconcerting new life.

Things get interesting when an apparently foiled bank robbery drops into his lap—or his hideout, literally. A large sum of cash allows the bright youngster to question the purpose of money and he goes on a good-hearted money-spending spree with his brother. There’s only one catch. The pound is about to switch to the Euro, and the money will soon be worthless if not spent or deposited. And then there’s the matter of the robber thug pursuing the youngster with vicious intimidation.

But the film isn’t really about the money, per se, it’s about a child coming to terms with loss, a popular and worthwhile topic in movies these days, from Marc Forster’s sublime Finding Neverland to Wayne Wang’s down-home sitcom Because of Winn-Dixie. And as staged by Mr. Boyle with visual flair and imagination, it works, for a while.

Boyle is an expert technical film director with a masterful grasp on composition, editing and tone. Here, he adopts a less showy approach in favor of his agreeably low-key story, and the results are a mixed bag stuffed with equal parts charm and ho-hum, and well, dullness. It pains me to say it since his films, which generally take genre elements and bridge the art film to the commercial film with impressive results, are most always fascinating and visceral. Sometimes dressed up with cool cinema style (Shallow Grave), other times alive with grimy digital experimentation (28 Days Later) and always infused with throbbing, numbing energy (Trainspotting).

Here he admirably reaches into his young protagonist’s humorous—albeit lonely—psyche and conjures up a sometimes funny, sometimes strained cavalcade of heightened, magical realist touches, as well as an almost-there picture of a young boy’s grieving—captured beautifully in a late scene where the boy inadvertently finds himself at the workplace of his dead mother.

But something here doesn’t quite connect. It may likely be that the story itself, while likable enough in a smallish way, is just not that engaging. By the time it reaches its frantic and fitfully amusing climax—the boys, their father and his girlfriend race through London on a money spending spree—the film has gone all over the map and lost dramatic focus. We don’t care enough about the money, the children or the father, and a final reunion with the dead mother’s spirit curiously lacks the emotional impact such a meeting should deliver.

Boyle is a wonderful filmmaker and clearly feels affectionately for this story. It remains a minor, wispy and uneven film that’s always watchable, though never memorable.