Starring Katie Boland, Alberta Watson, and Stuart Wilson. Rating unavailable.

A memoir of a bittersweet Canadian childhood in the 1950s, Some Things That Stay gets so many tough things right that one is tempted to forgive it for getting even more small stuff wrong.

Its narrative weaknesses may make this an unfortunately forgettable slice of nostalgia, but the film is nonetheless a solid vehicle for the emerging talents of young Katie Boland, 15 when this was directed by Gail Harvey, who also happens to be her mother. Harvey, a well-respected movie-stills photographer who made some exploitation flicks in the 1990s with the likes of Shannon Tweed and Shannen Doherty, directed numerous episodes of The Zack Files, on which her daughter was a standout regular.

Here, she works with Catherine Gourdier's clunky adaptation of Sarah Willis's 1999 novel of the same name. Boland plays headstrong Tamara Anderson, eldest of three children shunted across North America at the whims of her parent, a self-absorbed painter, Stuart, and his free-spirited wife, Liz. They are played by impressive Brit Stuart Wilson and Alberta Watson, affecting some sort of vaguely Irish accent, as well as a troubling cough.

Where the book was set in the Eisenhower-era U.S., the filmmakers move the action, and the Andersons, from the Deep South to rural Ontario. In the first of many narrative missteps, no one in the family makes note of the fact that they are car-trekking to another country, and viewers are left to sort out the journey with the help of nothing but accents and small cultural touchstones.

Where the novel's Liz was a Communist-sympathizing atheist, Harvey and Gourdier reduce her views to that of a former nude model who rails against religion for no explained reasons. This alone should cause trouble when they rent a house across from the Murphys, "strict Baptists", but the opposition proves to be toothless on both sides of the street.

For example, when the up-to-date Tamara dolls up her new friend, the Murphys' youngest daughter (Megan Park), to look like reigning sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, you expect screams of righteous indignation to cut through the surrounding woods. Instead, the next time Tamara bumps into her pal's scruffy dad (Forever Knight's Geraint Wyn Davies), he simply chuckles and says, "That was quite a makeover you gave our Brenda." Makeover? What is this, Queer Eye for the Fundamentalist Guy?

If Harvey tries to make everyone too nice, and too modern, she handles some tricky bits with real grace. In particular, Tamara's sexual awakening, at the somewhat clumsy hands of Brenda's older brother (Air Bud survivor Kevin Zegers), avoids clichés with startling precision. Too bad that Boland, who breathes similar originality into the stale writing, is also saddled with voice-over intonations that do nothing but describe what we have already seen or are about to see. If only Harvey had trusted the audience as much as she did her daughter.