Ten year old Jojo Rabbit (Roman Griffin Davis) can't tie his shoes and is uneasy around roughhousing but he has a burning desire to serve his Fuhrer. When he finds out his mother (Scarlett Johansen) is a harboring a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) it throws his childish principles into disarray. Having already adopted Hitler as an imaginary pal he struggles with his dual loyalty between mom and monster.

Jojo is pure SS (sober and silly), its split personality failing to jell cogently, the dark moments hackneyed amid raucous slapstick and heavy handed caricatures save for Sam Rockwell's cynically comic German officer, dead ender.

The Hitler/Harvey hybrid gimmick works for all of five minutes before losing its edge and director Taika Waititi, for some reason bathing his film in green does not help matters by casting himself in the role. Johansen and McKenzie display adequate melancholy while Davis as Jojo is impressive in the lead, recalling Oskar from Volker Schlondorff's superb The Tin Drum (79), a far more accomplished film on the topic featuring a similar character. With its mood swings and hipster incidentals Jojo Rabbit remains too detached playing with itself to invest any emotion in.