Palmer, with Justin Timberlake and Juno Temple

Sometimes good is not good enough. Palmer it is a perfectly adequate, sometimes engaging drama about a man with a past who learns to care for a troubled and sensitive child, but all the time he teases you with the much more powerful film it could have been. It is also a good example that not all actors – as talented as they are – can save parts that don’t give them enough to do.

The film follows Eddie Palmer (Justin Timberlake), a former high school football star who just got out of prison (for robbery and assault) and returned to his hometown in Louisiana to rebuild his life. Living with his grandmother Vivian (a charming June Squibb), Eddie is intrigued by the family who lives in a trailer on his property: Shelly (Juno Temple), his abusive boyfriend and his sensitive and kind son Sam (Ryder Allen), from whom Vivian seems to take care of most of the time.

But then Shelly disappears. And then Vivian dies. And suddenly, Eddie becomes responsible for young Sam, whose situation represents a challenge for a guy like him: the boy likes princesses and makeup, and is chosen without mercy. And not just for other children. Eddie’s friends – a macho band of beer-eating boys, playing pool, fighting in bars and watching football – also express disdain for the boy. Eddie himself at first does not know what to do with this child who looks nothing like him. But, working as a janitor at the local elementary school, he sees firsthand the difficult times Sam goes through at school and begins to have thoughts of trying to adopt the boy.

It’s not hard to say where the story is going, and Eddie’s emotional transformations are a foregone conclusion from the film’s first scenes. Director Fisher Stevens and screenwriter Cheryl Guerriero certainly know how to push our buttons: we’re rooting for Sam and Eddie, and there are some characters here who wouldn’t mind seeing us get punched in the face, and one of them even does. Timberlake is not a bad actor and he is certainly a nice guy. Eddie’s reservation means that he rarely emoticons, so it helps that he’s being played by someone nice to look at, who exudes a kind of horrible kindness, even if it’s not exactly what the role requires.

But that is also the type of problem. With such predictable traits and such a malnourished history, Palmer it requires truly excellent performance to give Eddie the kind of dimensionality and inner life that will bring us into his world. The character’s tense reticence is his constant response to a world that is sometimes confusing, infuriating and painful, and that’s understandable – it’s kind of the point of the film, actually – but after a while it can also tragically seem like a note as if he was always looking the same, no matter what the situation. As an actor, Timberlake is usually at his best when he gets big (which is why he should do more comedies). Based on the evidence here, he doesn’t have the dexterity or subtlety to put glimpses of emotion into such a quiet and submerged character. (For an example of what another actor can do in similarly restricted circumstances, although in a very different film, watch Ralph Fiennes in Excavation, where it touches a buttoned type and still gives us something new every time the camera captures it.)

Again, Palmer it’s not a bad movie. It’s decent, in more ways than one, with the heart in the right place and some exciting moments. Like much of what we have today, time will pass, which may be everything you need while watching on Apple TV +. But it clearly aspires to more and could have been more.

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