IN the early 1980s, Irishman Jim Sheridan was just another struggling actor in New York.

He was adrift, with his young family. All the while there was the memory of his parents suffering the loss of a young child, a loss that continues to affect Sheridan too. He put the two experiences together, asked his daughters to add their own recollections of those struggling New York City days and came up with In America, part American Dream fable, part autobiographical reflection on bereavement.

Like Sheridan, Johnny (Paddy Considine) is an aspiring Irish actor who seeks a new beginning across the Big Pond, and yet his only acting success is to con his way past the authorities at the Canadian border.

He and young wife Sarah have left Ireland behind, but they cannot escape the tragedy that still shadows them: the death of their baby son. Johnny's method of coping is to suppress his emotions, yet he does so to the point of being numb to all feeling and judgement, placing himself and family at risk (in a superb performance by Considine). This numbness is hardly ideal for an actor, whose work demands expression, nor for his relations with Sarah and their two daughters, 11-year-old Christy and Ariel, seven (sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger).

Sarah seeks to hide her pain, to protect her children, but there is a hollowness to her eyes that tells the truth (Morton can convey this like no other British actress today). It is the girls who drag both family and the film out of the mire, making a fist of living on next to nothing in a run-down apartment in Hell's Kitchen, befriending the tenement junkies and scallies.

To mirror the co-writing between Sheridan and his daughters, In America is seen through the innocent perspective of the girls, and while this runs the risk of sugaring the bitter pill, there is only one false note.

Tenement neighbour Matteo (Djimon Hounsou) is a voodoo conceptual artist, African aristo and AIDS victim rolled into one Hollywood composite, a clich of a strange character out of character with Sheridan's otherwise honest and affecting tale of love and redemption.

Updated: 09:32 Friday, November 14, 2003