Radcliffe shows different kind of charm

Daniel Radcliffe has a curious and not uninteresting way of proving he's more than Harry Potter. Most teenage stars of massive corporate movie franchises would either take a right turn into a superhero part or a left turn into indie-film grit. Not our Daniel: Earlier this year he turned up in a British stage revival of "Equus," as a psychotic, occasionally nude stable-boy. (He'll accompany the play to Broadway sometime in 2008).

Now Radcliffe arrives in theaters in the tasteful but muddled coming-of-age story "December Boys." It's a small movie and, as one of four orphans navigating adolescence in late-1960s Australia, the actor shares the spotlight. He acquits himself honorably, though, holding the screen with more quiet charisma than his co- stars. It would appear that he's biding his time.

The film, based on a novel by the late Australian writer Michael Noonan, is a problematic memory play, shot through with honey-colored nostalgia, that backs nervously into darker matters. The December boys of the title are four young friends at a Catholic orphanage in the outback - all born in December - who are sent on holiday to a seacoast village, played breathtakingly by locations on Kangaroo Island, off the coast of south Australia.

Maps (Radcliffe), the oldest at 17, is on the verge of giving up hope he'll ever be adopted. The film's narrator, Misty (Lee Cormie), is the youngest, timid and sensitive and a bit of a prat. Spit (James Fraser) and Sparks (Christian Byers) are rough-and-tumble 12-year-olds. The people they meet in the tiny beach community of Ladystar Cove offer glimpses of the adult world around the corner, not least of which is the beautiful and very French Teresa (Victoria Hill), who emerges topless from the sea to the boys' astonishment and delight.

She's married to Fearless (Sullivan Stapleton), a handsome stunt-cycle rider at a local circus, and the two pine for children they can't have. The possibility they might adopt one of the December boys sets off a subtle but fierce war among the group, with Misty, Spit, and Sparks all combing their hair and courting the older couple like a trio of Eddie Haskells.

Maps can't be bothered, having attracted the attention of Lucy (Teresa Palmer), a 16-year-old neighbor girl who gives off heat-waves of erotic intensity. The two meet regularly in a cave hide-out for conversations that inch closer and closer to the precipice; Palmer balances cruel confidence and hormonal overdrive so impressively that Radcliffe and we can only look on in awe.

There are life lessons to be learned, though, and sludgy symbolic devices like a mysterious black stallion that roams the beach and a giant fish named Henry who has never been caught. It's a tale awkwardly told, with jerky transitions between scenes that betray all the parts of the book that have been left out.

Worse, the two halves of "December Boys" - the pre-adolescent getting of wisdom and the adolescent getting of action - never mesh. When director Rod Hardy tries to resolve his busy plot strands toward the end, the film slides into melodrama and mild-mannered fantasy, with Misty's yearning to be part of a family rounded off in ways that just don't make sense. It's all very pretty, though, and for Radcliffe a decided holding action.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.