by JOANNE LATIMER

Don't be fooled by the cutesy voice-over of a seven-year-old lass in the new Jim Sheridan movie In America. It may feature two adorable little Irish girls, but their move to Manhattan isn't the stuff of Disney classics. This is Sheridan of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, after all, and desperation is his forté. Since Manhattan is a warehouse of desperation, the film hits the ground running and never suffers from the bogged-down inertia of most family dramas.

Johnny (Paddy Considine) is an under-employed actor who illegally relocates his family to New York. Their two-year-old son Frankie died back in Ireland, so there's an air of grief blunting their can-do enthusiasm for America. The mother (Samantha Morton, last seen playing the pod girl in Minority Report) is a waif cum storm trooper who loves her man, but guts him with a few digs about being a poor provider. Her two daughters (Sarah and Emma Bolger) are irrepressible angels, one with a camcorder, who make nice with neighbours in their tenement slum. The mother has a high-risk pregnancy and everything - including the rent - hangs in the balance.

"Don't you ‘little girl' me," says the oldest girl, who foreshortens her childhood to cope with poverty in the USA. It's a great line, from a long narrative tradition of Irish girls who grow up too fast to raise siblings or nurse alcoholic parents. Sheridan's dialogue has the ring of truth with every exchange, knowing how to ply silences when parental egos are too bruised for words.

"What was Frankie like?" a neighbour asks Johnny about his dead son.

"A warrior," responds Johnny, the way you tell near strangers things you want to believe about dead loved ones. It's a sad declaration, of course, but oddly full of hope for the family's future. Sheridan and his two daughters wrote this script from their real-life memories of landing in America and there isn't a drop of Irish politics in the plot, which makes this an unusual but no less moving Sheridan project.

In America opens Friday, Dec. 19

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