What is Joe thinking?

Letting his young son ride on the hood of his car while he speeds across the beach? Letting him run amok through the house (rarely, if ever, cleaned), living free of rules and structure?

What, indeed? Grief, wholesale lifestyle change and inexperience combine to make Joe a curious kind of father. Joe's fatherhood experience is the heart of "The Boys Are Back," director Scott Hicks' adaptation of Simon Carr's memoir.

As Joe, Clive Owen is good, capturing the flashes of panic, the bewilderment and the frustrations any parent knows. At times you don't know whether to laugh at the guy or call Child Protective Services.

Nicholas McAnulty is also good as Joe's younger son, Artie; George MacKay is even better as Harry, Joe's older son from a previous marriage who comes to Australia to live with his father. Although the film offers some genuinely heartfelt moments, too often it relies on gorgeous Australian scenery to try to hammer home any emotional connection. If the country is hurting for tourists during these economic doldrums, Hicks' footage ought to set things right.

Joe is an English journalist working in Australia, where he's his paper's best sports columnist. That means he's spent the better part of Artie's youth away from home, covering various swim meets, tennis tournaments and the like.

He loves his family, though, and is distraught when his wife (Laura Fraser) takes ill and dies. (These scenes play more honestly than any others in the movie.) The grief is natural enough, but Joe's got other problems — namely, how does he raise a son?

By trial and error, mostly. Harry learns this firsthand when he comes for an extended visit, getting away from his exclusive British boarding school and the long shadow his father, a former student, casts there. Joe isn't just lost in his loss (although there's some of that), he's pretty much lost, period.

As Joe explains to Harry, he tries to have as few rules as possible. Which, if you're 6, sounds great. By the time you're 14 — unless you're Joe — you realize that structure is maybe not such a bad thing. That's the point Laura (Emma Booth), the mother of a girl at Artie's school with whom Joe strikes up a friendship, tries repeatedly to make.

Alas, it doesn't sink in until a wrong-headed misadventure goes spectacularly (and predictably) wrong.

But if it takes some emotional shortcuts, "The Boys Are Back" still manages to convey some of the more mystifying aspects of parenthood. All the books tell you that you're not supposed to be a kid's friend, you're his parent.

Joe seems to have skipped that chapter. Most parents struggle with that dilemma — if not to the absurd degree Joe does, at least to some extent.

There is no question that Joe wants to do the right thing for his boys. He's just kind of a lunkhead in the way he goes about it.

Owen's portrayal of Joe's struggle is the greatest strength of "The Boys Are Back."