Trouble has a way of finding Eddie Palmer (Justin Timberlake), who’s recently returned to his rural Louisiana hometown after a 12-year prison stint for attempted murder. Staying with his loving grandmother, Vivian (June Squibb), while he gets back on his feet, the ex-football star spends a wild, drunken night with the methed-out Shelly (Juno Temple), who lives in a trailer behind Vivian’s house. And after Palmer learns that Shelly and her deadbeat husband, Jerry (Dean Winters), often head out on the road for weeks without warning or explanation, thus leaving their seven-year-old son, Sam (Ryder Allen), to be cared for by Vivian, the stage has been perfectly set for a very familiar story about a troubled adult and precocious child transcending their problems through the healing power of friendship.
Indeed, Fisher Stevens’s film covers well-trodden ground, but at least its handling of Sam’s gender fluidity evinces an unaffected tenderness that helps to counterbalance its broad-strokes portrait of rural America. One gets the sense that Sam understands that he’s different from his classmates, some of whom regularly pick on him, and that he feels the sting of rejection from his parents, but the film is careful not to make the boy’s victimization the engine of the story. And in doing so, it celebrates the young boy’s refusal to conform in the face of social pressures, as well as how he thrives when he’s in his element, particularly as Palmer learns to resist pressuring him to behave in stereotypically masculine ways.
Timberlake has a charming rapport with Allen, and their characters are fleshed out with enough lived-in details to make their friendship and inner lives feel fully realized. But you never stop expecting the moment where Sam’s presence will once and for all steer Palmer’s life in the right direction, and Cheryl Guerriero’s screenplay has a way of drawing attention away from the central dynamic with a plethora of extraneous subplots.
It doesn’t help that the film trots out so many clichés about the South and the hardscrabble folk who live there. Temple plays Shelly to a tic-addled hilt throughout, while a pair of knuckleheads, Tommy (Jesse C. Boyd) and Daryl (Stephen Louis Grush), who Palmer used to run with are ungenerously regarded as never having evolved past their high school personas. Even Sam’s teacher, Maggie (Alisha Wainwright), a recent divorcee who doubles as Palmer’s love interest, can’t escape the film’s vortex of semi-tragic tropes. And by the end of Palmer, this parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.
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