(L-R) Adam Butcher, director Michael McGowan and Campbell Scott on the set of Saint Ralph (Photos: Odeon Films)

I admit that on paper, Saint Ralph might not seem like it should work. Michael McGowan's second film, which opens today in New York, is a little too neat and clean and more than a couple of shades beyond the murky line demarcating incredulity. The film showcases a 14-year-old's quixotic quest to win the Boston Marathon as a means of "miraculously" curing his mother's terminal illness—a logline that does not have the most momentum behind it in terms of pushing jaded moviegoers into theaters.

Which is kind of why I wanted to see it. It did not hurt that it stars Campbell Scott and Jennifer Tilly (as a nurse! In the '50s!), who are generally bankable commodities in just about any film they take on, or that from the story alone, it seemed like it could be just quirky enough to have "sleeper" written all over it. And life is nothing if not a series of taking chances.

In the end, I am glad I did. Sure, Saint Ralph still has its digressions, from slo-mo melodrama to a few treacly family asides. But for a film to so unapologetically take on mortality, faith and subversion in what presents itself as a sort of coming-of-age dramedy, it must first earn a viewer's faith with characters for whom they have unshakable sympathy and trust. And it has to do it fast, without taking itself too seriously. That McGowan's script is hardly earth-shattering is precisely why it works; that his cast—especially Scott and indomitable 14-year-old newcomer Adam Butcher—consistently betrays any notion of low genre expectations is precisely why it works quite well.

"If you take the basic idea of a 14-year-old trying to win the Boston Marathon, it doesn't sound that different from a Disney film," McGowan told The Reeler during a recent visit to New York. "Just because it's about a 14-year-old boy doesn't mean it's for 14-year-olds. And there are no new stories anywhere; it's just sort of the execution of it that becomes sort of the art of it, if you will.".

Do not think, either, that Saint Ralph is inappropriate for 14-year-olds. Butcher's jittery performance eludes one convention after another—par for the teenaged course—and even his most heavy dramatic sequences find him suppressing sentimentality in favor of a robust independence. With his mother convalescing in the hospital and his long nights spent wearing his war-hero father's uniform around the empty home of his dead grandparents, Ralph Walker is essentially one brain tumor away from being an orphan. He spends his days as the odd man out at his Catholic school: smoking, fetishizing his classmate Claire and incurring the wrath of bullies and faculty alike.

Ralph's incapacity for subordination works in Butcher's hands; his resilient innocence defies the reprimands handed down by his school's principal, Father Fitzpatrick, who may be a little more sinister than logic allows but nevertheless commands Ralph to join the cross-country running squad as a means of discipline. There, Ralph falls under the tutelage of Father Hibbert (Scott), a Nietzsche-espousing teacher with a track record (literally) of his own. The film's narrative hinges on a lark that is better left without too much analysis: When the hospital's Nurse Alice (Tilly) concedes that only a miracle will save Ralph's mother, the boy connects that to Hibbert's own concession that Ralph winning the Boston Marathon would be a miracle.

So there you go. Along with a nauseatingly hoary pairing of remake #8,342 of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" with Ralph's slow-motion marathon scenes, you have the worst of it. By no means are Ralph's youth and innocence so intact that he could ever equate winning the marathon to his mother's recovery, but again, Saint Ralph works because McGowan does not necessarily want viewers overextending themselves beyond the themes at hand. And neither he nor Butcher are afraid to invoke the tenets of everything from magic realism (God shows up dressed as Santa Claus) to raunchy teen comedy (Ralph's autoerotic impulses scandalize him one day in the school swimming pool) in order to cut the proceedings' potential for insulin overload.

Of course, there are also even simpler ambitions at work at the film's core. "I just had an idea of a 14-year-old kid trying to win the Boston Marathon, and that was it," he said. "I didn't have anything else. And you start thinking, 'Does the world need another marathon film?' Well, if I'm making a boxing film, I'm kind of in trouble because there so many great boxing films. But after Chariots of Fire, it really comes down to Michael Douglas' Running, I think. And the running sequences in that thing are terrible. And marathons and running are such mass participation events that it sort of made sense that you could find an audience."

Scott and Butcher, resting between training montages

The running sequences in Saint Ralph are hardly terrible, but more often than not, they succumb to a montage sensibility that neuters so many sports films. The film is way more notable for its handling of basic existential struggles in the least conceited ways possible; Ralph relentlessly studies a slim volume called Canadian Martyrs, while the priests unpretentiously debate the role of self-determinism in spiritual growth. McGowan owes much of this latter element's edge to Scott, an actor of such great, economical talent who seems to live and breathe every letter of every word of every line he delivers. His Hibbert is tortured, but he is equally disinclined to resolve his pain through cheap emotional means; he does not pray for validation as much as he willfully expects it.

And McGowan, whose own Catholic upbringing in Toronto anchors both Ralph's and Hibbert's battles reconciling faith with rationality, added that he did not worry too much about the church's reaction to his irreverent material. Furthermore, he had the blessing of a Canadian film apparatus that not only encourages independent filmmakers, but also helps fund them. "It was great, because we could make it in a vacuum," McGowan told me. "We didn't have to look for outside help or try to get US distribution. It is not filmmaking by committee; it's a huge collaborative effort, but it's my film. I'm not sitting there asking marketing people what they thought of the script."

That spirit ebbs and flows throughout Saint Ralph, whose characters wield stubborn streaks that expand their intrigue and establish a surprising rapport with their audience. And in a summer where the supposed best of the best is as hit or miss as a table game, I will gladly take whatever surprises are out there.