Colin Farrell stars as a tragedy plagued man in sweet but flawed film doomed by one-dimensional characters Can't go home

A Home At The End of the World" is set up to showcase the absolute adorableness of Colin Farrell. It does an adequate enough job of that. But it is Sissy Spacek, in a handful of deftly played scenes, who really earns what limited attention the film deserves.

Based on an early book by Pulitzer Prize-winning

"The Hours" author Michael Cunningham and adapted

by him for the screen, "Home" covers just about

every alternative culture trend from the acid-

washed '60s to the AIDS-stricken '80s.

Played, quite well, by Erik Smith as a teenager and, um, adorably by Farrell as a semigrown man, Bobby Morrow suffers the loss of everyone he loves - older brother, both parents - at a tender age and spends the rest of the movie open-heartedly seeking replacement family units.

First up is a geeky Ohio high school friend, Jonathan Glover (Harris Allan as a teen, Dallas Roberts later), whose mom Alice (Spacek) takes the charming Bobby in. Spacek makes you believe that she accepts the boys' gay relationship, and in the movie's one perfect scene, Bobby gets her stoned for the first time, and they dance.

Once Bobby's seductive niceness is combined with Farrell's physical attractiveness, he's darn nigh irresistible. This is proved once he follows Jonathan to New York, where he is quickly introduced to the joys of heterosexuality by his pal's older, punky roommate Clare (Robin Wright Penn, who declares Clare's neurotic neediness by constantly changing her hair color - but not painting in the personality complexities that the similarly multihued Kate Winslet did in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind").

Another nontraditional family unit is soon set up, complete with child and some upstate bucolic bliss, though it's haunted by an underlying frustration and that horrible new disease. None of this seems to really bother Bobby, although he does occasionally express vague survivor's guilt and the natural wish not to be abandoned yet again.

Yet Farrell fails to persuasively enact any of the darker scars you'd expect to find on Bobby's psyche. He's just an innocent sweetheart throughout the movie, which may partly be the fault of stage veteran Michael Mayer, whose first film-directing job this is.

Then again, maybe Irish bad boy Farrell wanted it this angel-baby way. There has been much talk about a full-frontal nude scene that's been cut out of the release print, and Farrell has stated that he's pleased with that decision. Doesn't sound like the old rogue we knew and loved.

Cunningham, on the other hand, should have made sure more dimension got into the script, and not just in Spacek's handful of scenes.