John Miller, left, and William Eadie, who plays a 12-year-old with a secret in "Ratcatcher"

(3 stars) Ratcatcher. (U) Picturesque fable about a pre-adolescent boy in '70s Glasgow who keeps a secret, meets a girl, confronts adulthood with a wary eye. Poetic, like gasoline on a rain puddle. With WIlliam Eadie, Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews, Leanne Mullen, Michelle Stewart. Written and directed by Lynne Ramsay 1:33 (nudity, adult situations, language). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Quad Cinema, Manhattan.

We're on pretty familiar, working-class British ground with "Ratcatcher," director Lynne Ramsay's debut and a harrowing / whimsical coming-of-age film set in '70s Glasgow. Look closely: You might spot the ghost of Lindsay Anderson having a pint with Ken Loach at the local pub. Or the cast of "Secrets and Lies" just ambling about the council flats.

But Ramsay adds more than a touch of poetry to her portrait of the city and of James (William Eadie), a 12-year-old who watches a friend drown, keeps it secret and then spends the rest of the movie trying to reconcile his life and his guilt. It's grim--the festering refuse of a garbage strike is piling up around them all, just in case you missed the point of waste and claustrophobia. And James' family isn't exactly the Bloomsbury Group. His father (Tommy Flanagan) possesses the distinct air of brutality. Ma (Mandy Matthews) is kind, but ineffectual. James finds consolation with Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), an unpopular local girl whose gawkiness is leading her to promiscuity. They take a bath together. It's the least erotic thing you've ever seen.

But none of this is easily tossed off by Ramsay. Her characters are rich, her atmosphere is genuine, her problems are mundane, perhaps, but not to the people who have them--James' family, for instance, is wracked by apprehension over whether the local council will give them a bigger apartment, one with indoor plumbing.

There's a real sense of life being lived; humor, awkwardly but persistently, shoots up between the cracks in the concrete. And the occasional pastoral image suggests hope for James, even if the unavoidable implication of "Ratcatcher" (with a bounty on rats, catch, the garbage strike creates a windfall) is about what James will become. Not the sensitive man his boyhood seems to suggest. More like another extra in a Ken Loach movie.