"Breakfast on Pluto"

Rarely does a director capture the essence of a great book as well as Neil Jordan did with Patrick McCabe's "Breakfast on Pluto."

For the many of you who missed out (it never played anywhere near our Southern outpost of America), you can catch up on DVD today.

The story centers on Patrick "Kitten" Braden, who discovers at an early age that he enjoys dressing like a girl, not a terribly well-accepted thing to do in Northern Ireland in the 1960s.

Patrick is played as a young adult with spirit by Cillian Murphy, who managed to snag a Golden Globe nomination for getting all dragged up.

It is deliberately, and occasionally annoyingly, episodic, with no scene lingering for longer than a few minutes. But that's how Patrick deals with "the troubles," choosing to live in a fantasy world that repeatedly gets shattered by the reality of life.

On a quest to find out his father is, Patrick travels to London and elsewhere, befriending along the way characters like Stephen Rea as an odd magician and Brendan Gleeson as a children's entertainer with an amusingly short fuse. It's all fairly light but very entertainng fare.

McCabe has written some bad books, but this one struck just the right balance between whimsy and woe, and Neil Jordan kept that alive in this little flick. Check it out.