It seems to be that the more writers you have on a film, the higher the expectation is that the dialogue will be labored and trite, and that the story will be somewhat of a mess. But these films are usually big-budget blockbusters with explosions and car chases and sex, so who really cares about the hackneyed banter. So it really is disappointing when August Rush, a low-budget tale of people and music, and of the search for ourselves and each other, falls into this category.

From director Kirsten Sheridan (Disco Pigs), daughter of Jim Sheridan (In America, The Boxer), comes this rather baffling film. Evan (Freddie Highmore), a boy abandoned at birth and now living in a group home decides to head to New York city to find the parents he believes are looking for him. Once in New York he meets up with a group of young buskers who work the streets and he soon discovers that the music that he’s known only inside his head can be released, and that he’s something of a musical prodigy.

He’s given the name August Rush by a man named Wizard (Robin Williams), who corrals these young performers and gives them a place to stay in an abandoned theatre in return for some of their profits. August believes that he has a connection to his parents through the music that flows through him, and that they’ll find him as he plays on the street.

But August Rush is not a children’s film. While there are moments and elements of pure Disney-style fairy tale that would be enormously entertaining to children, there are several strands of the story that are overly grounded in adult drama and inappropriate (or just boring) for kids. The filmmakers have decided to call this indecisive lack of direction ‘magic realism’, and it would seem that the director here has been overwhelmed by the four credited writers’ stilted dialogue and lack of cohesion.

Keri Russell (Felicity) and the humorless Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Match Point) do decent job playing August’s star-crossed parents, cruelly separated after their one night of passion, neither knowing that August is alive. As ‘Wizard’ Robin Williams turns in a bizarre, overacting, schizophrenic Bono impersonation that is distracting and hard to take seriously. But it’s Freddie Highmore, the small boy who stole the show against Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet in Finding Neverland, who again here does a brilliant job of carrying the emotional core of the film.

Though this isn’t enough to save the film. And it really is disappointing because it’s quite easy to see how August Rush could have been far more successful as a pure children’s fantasy, rather than this mishmash of ideas that attempts to appeal to everyone, but finds itself entertaining to no one.

August Rush rates 2 stars.