It was hard not to approach The Boys are Back without dread.

For one thing it is directed by Scott Hicks, who came to fame with 1996’s Shine, the sentimental and dishonest Oscar-winner about schizophrenic pianist David Helfgott, and who then made far worse films like Snow Falling on Cedars and No Reservations.

For another, the trailer makes this tale of a widower raising two sons amid golden Australian wine country landscapes look dull and cloying.

However The Boys are Back — inspired by what is by all accounts a moving and funny memoir by Independent columnist Simon Carr — turns out to be surprisingly compelling.

Joe Warr (Clive Owen) is a hard-drinking British sportswriter who spends much of his time on the road while his wife Kate (Laura Fraser) looks after their six-year-old son Artie (Nicholas McAnulty) and their big bungalow on the gorgeous South Australia coast.

Out of nowhere, Katy is diagnosed with mestastasised bowel cancer, and dies after a battle with the illness that is succinctly drawn and genuinely upsetting to watch.

Joe, who has never been much of a father, has to learn to be a parent to Artie. His mother-in-law (Julia Blake) is happy to help but Joe actually wants to raise the boy himself — he is, it turns out, consumed with guilt about his abandonment of another older son who lives with his ex-wife back in Britain.

Like many men, Joe loves roughhousing and playing with his son; he is not as good at the boring stuff. Fortunately he gets some help from Laura (Emma Blake), the pretty single mother of one Artie’s schoolfriends, who is obviously smitten with Joe’s alpha-male charms.

He also gets the odd piece of advice from his dead wife, who appears to him when he is alone — it is not clear if her surreal presence is a ghost or a projection.

Things get more complicated when Joe’s teenage other son comes over to stay. Harry (Rupert Grint look-alike George MacKay) and Artie bond beautifully in what are the film’s most moving and understated scenes. But Joe does not know how to communicate with his teenage son and cannot see that the boy finds his household chaos more upsetting and frightening than amusing.

Crises follow, not all of them convincing. And the screenplay by Alan Cubitt fails to resolve some of the questions it raises about the family and Joe’s efforts to be a good father.

You are clearly supposed to think that Joe is on balance a good dad. Like Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs Kramer, he is shocked by the amount of work it takes to run his household but unlike a lot of movie fathers, he does know how to use a washing machine. However, he chooses to live in what he calls “hog heaven”, with bicycles in the kitchen and food-encrusted plates all over the place, and defends that choice to visiting women like his mother in law and Laura.

In general, things go wrong only when, under female influence, he abandons his mantra of “just say yes” to impose discipline and make his boys do their share of housework. Somewhat implausibly, none of the exuberant horseplay that he encourages ever leads to pain or tears. There is no question that we tend to be overprotective of children in Britain and America, but Joe’s habit of letting his six-year-old sit on his the bonnet of his Land Rover while he races it down the beach seems more reckless than cool.

Though the film is a British-Australian co-production, and based on a book by a Brit, there is something very Hollywood about its enthusiasm for lazy, loosy-goose parenting and its discomfort with discipline. But then filmmakers everywhere tend to be a self-indulgent lot, relatively bad at things like staying married to the same person or bringing up kids.

While Owen has never revealed a wide emotional range as an actor, specialising in impassive but prickly characters, it does feel as if he is deliberately and bravely playing Joe as arrogant and petulant. At times there is a clash between this gritty portrayal and the overall glossiness of Hicks’s film, which could almost be a tourism commercial for South Australia.

That said, it is a pleasure to see Owen act with children, and The Boys are Back proves that he can handle vulnerability and humour as well as handguns and good-looking girls.