Perhaps gauging that his rough'n'ready image could do with a bit of smoothing off, Irish firebrand Colin Farrell has gone all touchy-feely.

Touchy feely, lawks-a-mercy, with another bloke. However, you can take these things too far...so his character ends up siring a sprog with the woman in both their lives.

He's Bobby, a boy living a bohemian 60s life in suburban Ohio who is emotionally scarred for life when he sees his adored elder brother die in a double glazing incident.

You can tell the nine-year-old's been psychologically sideswiped - he admits a liking for Jefferson Airplane and begins a serious cannabis habit.

If the weed and the spacy beats of the 60s acid casualties aren't enough, his mother dies when he's still in his teens followed shortly by his father.

Anyway, he subsequently finds the stability he craves at the welcoming home of Jonathan (Roberts) and his likeably distracted mom (Spacek).

Bobby and Jonathan soon become inseparable and early sexual experimentation leads to a closer friendship than perhaps their parents would have approved.

Fast-forward to the 1970s and Jonathan is a New York-based, full-blown homosexual predator...who also enjoys a fertile relationship with free-spirit Clare (Wright Penn).

Into this heady erotic brew plunges Jonathan, who moves into the couple's ramshackle East Village apartment and makes a menage a trois of it.

At this point the no-holds barred sexuality gets as complex as a naked game of Twister. Blindfold. After a crate of alco-pops.

The upshot is Clare gets pregnant by Bobby and the threesome quit the city to raise the child in the rural idyll of Woodstock (a farmhous...not the festival).

Based on the book by the The Hours writer Michael Cunningham, it's not as if first-time director Michael Mayer wears his (Emmy-winnig) theatrical background lightly.

The action's never opened out so you find yourselves in the pockets of the trio - not a good place to be if they're not particularly attractive people.

Thankfully, decent performances - Farrell is particularly good and Spacek a scene stealer par excellence - make for a poignantly affecting time.

Even if you can see the ending coming a mile off and things get a little self-conscious, it would seem this home is where the heart is.

Tim Evans