Starring Cillian Murphy and Liam Neeson. Rated 14A.

There aren't any werewolves, vampires, or haunted castles in Neil Jordan's latest movie; on the other hand, just about every other narrative tic and trope in this prolific Irish director's career is very much present in this alternately hilarious and heartbreaking rendition of Patrick McCabe's Booker Prize-nominated novel, Breakfast on Pluto (McCabe worked on the script with Jordan, repeating the creative process that led to their previous collaboration, The Butcher Boy).

The hero of this picaresque tale is Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy, playing against the villainous type he portrayed in Batman Begins), a foundling who begins life in a basket left on a priest's doorstep before growing into a transvestite semi-prostitute of questionable sanity during the darkest years of Ulster's latest round of troubles. Obsessed with finding his missing mother (who's said to be a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor), Braden drifts from town to town and arm to arm, hooking up at various times with rockabilly musicians, IRA gunmen, serial killers, British soldiers, Soho strippers, London police constables, n'er-do-wells, punters, and outcasts of every description. Throughout it all he maintains an air of cheery optimism, even if every crisis comes close to triggering a complete mental breakdown.

Once again, Jordan is playing fast and familiar with gender (The Crying Game), race (Ruth Negga brings new meaning to the phrase "Black Irish"), crime (Danny Boy), hooking (Mona Lisa), and nationalist politics (Michael Collins). He also employs popular music the way Alan Parker did in The Commitments, and he even includes the occasional homage to such decidedly un-Gaelic cinematic masterpieces as Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas.

If Breakfast on Pluto is much more than just a walk down the back alleys of the director's memory, this can be attributed to two things, both interconnected.

The first is the sheer exuberance of the direction, a visual flamboyance epitomized by the use of two subtitled robins who serve as a kind of Greek chorus.

The second is the quality of the dialogue, which is invariably at its best when Braden is at his most threatened and dissociative (thus, when beaten by a British police constable, the suspected "transvestite terrorist" implausibly intones, "We're all friends here," just as he tells the Republican hard men who disgustedly declare him not worth killing, "Surely you can spare a bullet between the two of you!").

Ultimately, there's something about Braden's three-quarters-cracked survival instinct that is surprisingly affecting. Behind his mask of dysfunction lurks a surprisingly strong, unexpectedly upbeat character.

Which explains why, in the final analysis, Breakfast on Pluto is a pleasingly raucous hoot.