ABOUT A Boy is all about Hugh Grant. Without him, no film. Forever cast as the single man with the anxiety attacks, he has played the nice, bumbling commitment coward (Four Weddings), the hopeless romantic (Notting Hill) and the bounder (Bridget Jones's Diary).

All were old-fashioned comedic leading men with foppish fringes, Mills & Boon tendencies and shades of Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips as much as Cary Grant. So his change of tack in About A Boy is welcome, and it goes deeper - but not much deeper - than the new spiky hair, the swapping of shirts for T-shirts and freshly acquired Estuary English accent.

Grant, playing 38 but suddenly looking his 40 years, is cast as yet another feckless chap with no ties and no financial worries but for the first time, he has to be hip and then paternal - as much a challenge for him as the character he portrays. Once more, he manages to look awkward, his trademark, yet whereas normally he is at ease with such discomfort, initially he looks uncomfortable in new surroundings. Later he settles for ever so slightly sending himself up for trying to act cool.

Grant is womanising, self-centred Will Freeman, a punning name more usually to be found in Trollope or Dickens but here the invention of Nick 'Fever Pitch' Hornby, whose best-seller has been re-shaped for the screen by the unlikely duo of American Pie writer-directors Chris and Paul Weitz.

Seeing himself as an island, shallow Will has never worked, watching Countdown and counting up women and designer gadgets instead. He is a single man in more ways than one: he lives entirely off the proceeds of his father's fluke success, a one-hit wonder with his ghastly but ubiquitous Christmas song.

Ever the pleasure seeker, Will has decided there must be plenty of fish to be caught in the torrid sea of single motherhood. On joining a single parents' group, he envisages quick dips and quick exits, but nothing had prepared him for 12-year-old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), an ostracised schoolboy with a suicidal hippie mother (Toni Collette, whose sense of pain rises above the caricatures all around her).

Hornby's cautionary tale, with his familiar mix of warmth, self-deprecation and everyman wisdom, is a little far-fetched and simplistic but likeable in its small-scale charms. Suspension of cynicism is required to believe fellow misfits Will and Marcus would bond but bond they do for mutual lessons in life, Will learning humility from Marcus, vulnerable Marcus acquiring trendy tips from Will.

Under the plain direction, the film is never more than a lightly humorous diversion rather than a carousel of laughs, with Rachel Weisz's sharp, but brief, appearances as Will's new love interest typical of the underwritten support roles. Thank Badly Drawn Boy's lovely, lo-fi soundtrack and Grant's comic timing for bringing star quality to Hornby's trains of home-spun thought.

Updated: 10:18 Friday, April 26, 2002