Perhaps some books aren't meant to be adapted for the screen. Or at least not on your first attempt as a feature director.

Simon Baker is a renowned Australian actor best known for his work on US TV shows like The Mentalist and The Guardian, and somewhere in that busy schedule he's found time to hunker down with Tim Winton to adapt the author's Miles Franklin-winning novel Breath.

A perilous enterprise akin to riding the giant wave in the book, known as Old Smokey.

Breath is a layered, angular novel about small town boys growing up in 1970s South Western Australia who come under the spell of a Svengali-like surfing ace and his reclusive American wife.

Its first-person adult narrator offers a sober assessment of its events, in particular his first sexual experience and how it caused great psychological harm in successive years.

But the film — also co-written with Top of the Lake screenwriter Gerard Lee — eschews much of this emotional framework.

Both Ben Spence and Samson Coulter grew up surfing competitively. ( Supplied: Roadshow Films )

It condenses the plot into a more straightforward coming-of-age tale about a sensitive teenager, Pikelet (Samson Coulter), his reckless, mop haired best friend Loonie (Ben Spence) and the glamorous but troubled hippy couple living on the edge of town — Sando and Eva — played by Baker himself and Elizabeth Debicki.

In the book, this pair are described with barely contained scorn by Winton — his deeply pragmatic, Christian worldview seemingly suspicious of their alternative spirituality and class privilege.

The critique is barely noticeable in the film.

Baker is a little too likeable to have a sinister side, perhaps, and lacks any alpha male menace, while Debicki isn't given the scope to fully develop what makes her so dark and damaged.

Only occasionally does the transposition from page to screen find transcendence in cinema's shorthand and dynamism.

A shot of Pikelet's father (Richard Roxburgh) watching his son dolefully from the back door, knowing he's losing him to Sando's surrogate figure, speaks as eloquently as any paragraph of prose.

The wave-riding sequences shot by water cinematographer Rick Rifici are also impressive, and even if the images of exquisitely curled waves and sublime underwater scapes aren't particularly original, their raw power has an undoubtable thrill.

Simon Baker's character Sando takes on a father figure role to the young boys. ( Supplied: Roadshow Films )

The bro-triangle that develops out there between Pikelet, Loonie and Sando is held together by an instinctive respect and hierarchy, but it's also threatened by ego and rivalries, especially as Loonie's increasingly erratic bravado drives him further into the direction his name suggests.

But the real emotional curve ball of the story is thrown by Eva. (Spoiler ahead).

It's not something Winton foreshadows in the book, because he's more interested in power than eroticism, but Pikelet and Eva become lovers.

The film is faithful to this surprise turn, avoiding depicting chemistry brewing between them, which is a pity. It could have done with the momentum.

As it is, their torrid affair — whose perversion is symbolised in a sex game involving a red plastic bag that gives new meaning to the title — doesn't land with the crash it should.

Elizabeth Debicki portrays Eva, a former pro aerial skier whose career ended due to injury. ( Supplied: Roadshow Films )

Partly, it's down to Eva's underdrawn character.

Mostly, it's because the film doesn't translate the considerable time Winton spends describing how Pikelet sees her once they've become intimate: his desire for her, his indifference to her, his repulsion from her.

His confused viewpoint says a lot about his immaturity, and foreshadows the damage she will do.

It's a very difficult thing to peer inside the head of a character like a novelist does, and an inexperienced writer-director can't be blamed for coming up short.

Baker's film is however a perfunctory adaptation with only rare moments that shine.

The sophisticated ambivalence of the novel is lost in translation.

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