The Boys Are Back, a sun-and-sorrow-drenched story of love, loss and “free range” fatherhood starring Clive Owen, takes you back to a time not so long ago when children hopped on bikes without helmets, jumped into lakes without water wings and onto trampolines without spotters, racing through childhood with reckless abandon.

And reckless abandon is probably the best attitude to adopt when watching this affectionate but sometimes terrifying tale of primal parenting in the hands of a Peter Pan of a dad.

Based loosely on British political reporter Simon Carr’s memoir recounting his attempts to rebuild his family after the death of his wife, it is a good story to put in the hands of director Scott Hicks, who has proved especially adept at films about men in crisis.

Although Hicks does not reach the emotional resonance of his eloquent 1996 Shine, which earned Geoffrey Rush an Oscar, he does expose a charming, softer side of Owen as Joe Warr that is rarely seen.

Filmmaker and screenwriter Allan Cubitt have provided a lot of risky business to contend with inside Joe’s world. An early scene of a jeep speeding along the ocean’s edge, Joe laughing behind the wheel and his 5-year-old son, Artie, balancing on its hood, hand gripping a windshield wiper, head thrown back in sheer joy, lets you know how frightening and glorious this wonderland will be. Just as clear is the subtext, too — what is there to fear when the worst has already happened?

It’s not that Joe is irresponsible, exactly; it’s more that he was never really cut out for responsibility, as if parents have that option. A newspaper sportswriter, most of his life is spent following the exploits of this team or that, while wife Katy (Laura Fraser) raises young Artie (Nicholas McAnulty) in a rural retreat in South Australia, and ex-wife Flick (Natasha Little) raises his now-teenage son Harry (George MacKay) in Britain.

But when cancer fells Katy, he is left to figure out how to pull himself and his young son past the dark cloud left by the loss of the much-loved wife and mother. For Joe, as much as the kids (in a typical teenage pique, Harry decides to bail on Mom and try living with Dad), it’s about how life sometimes forces our hand.

As much as The Boys Are Back puts us inside a very male world, Joe’s evolution tends to come at the hands of the women in his life. There are late-night conversations with his late wife; fights and reconciliations with her mother, well played by the fine actress Julia Blake; the patience of his ex and the ministrations of a hopeful single mom at Artie’s school, Aussie actress Emma Booth.

But it is with the boys that Joe, and Owen, is at his best, with MacKay’s Harry and McAnulty’s Artie turning in textured portraits of childhood’s various stages.

As is always the case, a reckoning will come, and it is here that the film falters most, taking father and sons to unnecessary extremes. In this, The Boys Are Back is a bit like the parenting it portrays — at times there is pain, mistakes will be made, but if you can get beyond that, there is pleasure to be found.

***1/2The Boys Are Back

Starring: Clive Owen, Laura Fraser, Nicholas McAnulty, Natasha Little, George MacKay, Julia Blake.

Rated: PG-13, contains sexual situations, adult themes.