A Laotian boy born under a curse struggles to turn his luck around in the affecting drama “The Rocket.”
The Australian-made film is set among poor villagers of Laos displaced by a dam-building project, who are forced to pack their belongings and go. Ten-year-old Ahlo (a cagey Sitthiphon Disamoe), whose grandmother tells him he’s been bad luck since the day he was born, causes or is present at a series of catastrophic accidents as the family roams across a land still littered with unexploded bombs dropped by the US in the Vietnam War. When Ahlo meets a girl and her eccentric, James Brown-fixated uncle — nicknamed Purple for the suit he wears (sans shirt) — he hopes his new mentor can help him build a prize-winning rocket, to be launched as part of a festival intended to appease the rain gods during a drought.
Long on atmosphere and less sentimental about poverty than “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the film carries a potent charge of authenticity. There is also an appealing strangeness: When told an unpleasant truth about one unpleasant fact, the boy reacts by barking like a dog. The rocket contest, though, isn’t really dramatic enough to build a movie around and doesn’t seem to offer much of a chance to change Ahlo’s subsistence-level circumstances. Still, the film does offer an aphorism of uncommon wisdom: “Goat testicle wine is not for wasting.”