As the Harry Potter franchise heads into the home stretch of films, some of the film’s young cast members are attempting to break out into other roles, or at least employ a little bit more emotional depth in the roles that they’ve made into small cottage businesses. And of course, the biggest one in the bunch is Harry himself, Daniel Radcliffe. He’s appeared in a London played named “Equus”, in which he appeared nude in and got a lot of notoriety for, but received some praise based on his performance. He also appeared in the Ricky Gervais show Extras where he played himself in a role where he really really wants to break out from his childhood perception. But in December Boys, he plays a bit of a loner of sorts, though people seem to label the film for the sensationalist things Radcliffe does in the film. Look, Harry Potter smokes and gets it on with a girl, wow! But looking beyond perception, it’s a decent film.

December Boys was a film that was adapted from a Michael Noonan novel and directed by Rod Hardy, who has directed mainly television shows, most recently, Battlestar Galactica. But in the film, Radcliffe plays a guy known as Maps, along with his friends Misty (Lee Cormie, Darkness Falls), Sparks (Christian Byers) and Spit (James Fraser). The boys are slightly older orphans who have not been adopted by any prospective Australian families and are getting to the age where adoption is unlikely. They share the same relative birthday in December, and at the orphanage they live at, the nuns give them a chance to go to the beach and enjoy a holiday during Christmas, where two sets of families decide to welcome them. The younger family apparently has aspirations for adopting one of the children and Misty finds this out, and the boys are thrown in a competition of sorts. Maps finds Lucy (Theresa Palmer, The Grudge 2), who is staying there for a time, and shows Maps his first real look at the birds and the bees.