Palmer, with Justin Timberlake and Juno Temple

Justin Timberlake and Ryder Allen in Palmer.
Photo: Apple TV +

Sometimes kind isn’t enough. Palmer is a perfectly adequate, at times engaging, drama about a man with a past learning how to care for a troubled and sensitive young child, but throughout it teases you with the film much more powerful than it could have been. It’s also a good example that all actors – however talented they may be – can’t salvage parts that don’t give them enough to do.

The film follows Eddie Palmer (Justin Timberlake), a former high school football star who has just been released from prison (for theft and assault) and returns to his hometown of Louisiana to rebuild his life. Moving in with his grandmother Vivian (a lovely June Squibb), Eddie is intrigued by the family living in a trailer on his property: Shelly (Juno Temple), her abusive boyfriend, and her sensitive and kind young son Sam (Ryder Allen ), which Vivian seems to deal with most of the time.

But then Shelly disappears. And then Vivian dies. And suddenly Eddie finds himself in charge of young Sam, whose situation presents a challenge for a guy like him: the boy loves princesses and makeup, and gets caught mercilessly. And not just by other children. Eddie’s friends – a macho herd of good old boys who eat beer, play pool, fight at the bar, watch football – also express disdain for the child. Eddie himself at first doesn’t know what to do with this kid who doesn’t seem like him. But, working as a janitor at the local elementary school, he gets to see firsthand Sam’s tough time at school and begins to have thoughts of trying to adopt the boy.

It’s not hard to tell where the story goes, and Eddie’s emotional transformations are a given from the first scenes of the film. Director Fisher Stevens and screenwriter Cheryl Guerriero certainly know how to push our buttons: we support Sam, and we support Eddie, and there are a few characters here that we wouldn’t want to get punched in the face, and one of ‘they even do it. Timberlake isn’t a bad actor, and he’s definitely a nice guy. Eddie’s reserve means he rarely emotates, so it helps that he’s played by someone pleasant to watch, who exudes a kind of cuteness, although that’s not exactly what the role is. calls.

But it’s also kind of a problem. With such predictable broad strokes, and such a malnourished story, Palmer requires a very high performance to give Eddie the kind of dimensionality and inner life that will bring us into his world. The character’s tense reluctance is his constant response to a world that is at times confusing, infuriating, and heartbreaking, and that’s understandable – that’s sort of the point of the movie, actually – but after a while it can, too. tragically feel a note, as if he always gave the same face regardless of the situation. As an actor, Timberlake is usually at his best when he grows up (which is also why he should be doing more comedy). Based on the evidence here, he doesn’t quite have the dexterity or subtlety to layer glimpses of emotion into such a calm and overwhelmed character. (For an example of what another actor can do under similarly constraining circumstances, albeit in a very different movie, watch Ralph Fiennes in Excavation, where he plays a button-down guy and still gives us something new every time the camera catches him.)

Again, Palmer is not a bad movie. It’s decent, in more ways than one, with his heart in the right place and a few touching moments. Like a lot of what we get these days, it will pass time, which may be all you need when you watch it on Apple TV +. But he clearly longs for more, and he clearly could have been more.