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This undated photo provided by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Left) starring as Louis Connelly and Keri Russell as Lyla Novacek in "August Rush." (Warner Bros.)

In her new film August Rush, director Kristen Sheridan (co-author of her father Jim Sheridan’s overlooked In America) and script writers Nick Castle and James V. Hart could clearly be charged with overt plagiarism of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. In this modern retelling of the 19th Century classic, Sheridan’s orphan protagonist is the love child of a pair of talented musicians who part after a tender night of passion on a Greenwich Village rooftop.

Audiences will either love this copy-cat emotional fantasy or absolutely choke on its sweetness. Keri Russell, television’s Felicity, is Lyla Novacek, a talented young cellist who one evening meets Louis Connelly, played by Match Point’s Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a rough, but equally talented Irish rock guitarist. While magic brings them together, fate will keep them apart. Their child is born after an accident nearly kills Lyla and she is told, by her controlling father, that the baby died in the accident.

Freddie Highmore, the doe-eyed boy from Finding Neverland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is the film’s title character - the street boy who hears the sounds of music in all aspects of nature. He makes his way from the Walden Country Home for Boys into New York City, searching instinctively for his parents. In the famed Washington Square, he discovers a young musician (Leon G. Thomas III) playing guitar for money and is then taken in by his guardian, a Fagan-esque old guy named the Wizard (Robin Williams). Fate and endless coincidence will eventually turn the boy into a talented musician and composer, eventually being discovered by the Julliard School of Music and, with the saccharine filled touch of a Disney film, all leads to a predictably happy resolution.