Recensioni de* critic*

It’s decent, in more ways than one, with its heart in the right place and a couple of moving moments. Like so much of what we’re getting nowadays, it’ll pass the time, which may be all you need as you watch it on Apple TV+. But it clearly aspires to more, and it clearly could have been more.

Despite the many tensions at play in Cheryl Guerriero’s script, something about the movie doesn’t quite leap off the page.

If “Palmer” had emerged as Sam’s story, this formulaic film might have found its footing following a mold-breaking character down familiar country roads. Instead, the director Fisher Stevens hews closely to Palmer, a tough guy with a sensitive side who punches people when he feels feelings.

The best thing that can be said about Palmer is that it’s innocuous: overlong and sentimental, but rarely annoying.

Smart without going full “I Am Sam,” cute without being all “Jerry Maguire” about it, and stoic without constantly performing his personal history of abandonment, Sam keeps things anchored in his own precocious truth even when the movie around him teeters towards melodrama. That’s a tricky balancing act, and one that “Palmer” commits to within the confines of a sub-genre that typically relies on a safety net of kitsch.

A capable cast helps the pic rise above its formulaic nature... but doesn’t make it a must-watch by any means. For followers of Timberlake’s acting record, which has had ups and downs in both commercial and artistic terms, it’s more evidence that a fruitful second career might await the pop star if he wants it.

Take out a few “gritty” details that account for the film’s R rating, and “Palmer” is formulaic enough to pass for a faith-based movie. Academia has provided all sorts of tools to analyze the dynamics on display here — terms like “gender-nonconforming,” “heteronormative conditioning” and “internalized homophobia” — but laypeople often bristle at such big words. Stevens clearly feels that the emotional route is more powerful than the intellectual one...

In the hands of actor-director Fisher Stevens... Palmer plays like a fourth-rate Oscar bid from the early aughts, all washed-out cinematography and guitar pluck score, the kind of film that would have aimed to break big at Sundance with critics calling its lead performance “revelatory”.

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.