Butler's Cinema Scene

“MIDNIGHT SPECIAL”  My rating: B

112 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There is almost no element of “Midnight Special” that hasn’t been already thoroughly mined by other science fiction/fantasy films over the last 40 or so years.

And yet through some sort of cinema alchemy writer/director Jeff Nichols makes it all fresh and compelling.

Nichols is the Arkansas auteur of oddball down-home dramas like “Shotgun Stories,” “Take Shelter” and “Mud.” Here he ventures into full-blown genre moviemaking, and for the most part sucks us in and leaves us wanting even more.

The film begins with three individuals on the run. Roy (Michael Shannon), his eight-year-old son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher, the scene-stealing kid from “St. Vincent”), and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are making their way across Texas and into Louisiana in a beat-up car that has more Bondo than paint.

Alton is a strange kid who sits in the back seat wearing sound-damping headphones and blue swimming goggles. Since they travel only at night he uses a flashlight to read a stack of comic books.

Turns out the trio are the object of a massive manhunt, not only by the feds (FBI, CIA, whatever else you got) but by the members of a Texas religious cult with whom Elton has lived for the last two years.

Apparently the kid has had visions which have now become as much a part of the sect as the shapeless sisterwife dresses worn by their womenfolk. Incensed that Elton’s dad has snatched him up, the cult leader (Sam Shepherd) dispatches a couple of heavily-armed members of the congregation (Bill Camp, Scott Haze) to recover the boy in the few days remaining before a prophesized day of judgment.

Nichols’ strength as a storyteller is that he doesn’t drop too much up front. His films are voyages of discovery in which audiences pick up the characters’ backgrounds and info about the plot in dribs and drabs.

Joel Edgerton, Michael Shannon, Jaeden Lieberher, Kristen Dunst

Why, for instance, is Roy’s companion Lucas so good at handling weapons and paramilitary gear (like night vision goggles)? How is he able to outguess the authorities on their trail?

Be patient. Answers will be forthcoming.

And then there’s little Elton’s weird behavior. He can shoot beams from his eyes and cause earthquakes when he’s upset. He’s allergic to sunlight…until he isn’t any more. The kid is both terrified of what’s happening to him and slowly coming to the realization that he’s not of this earth. Not precisely, anyway.

Adam Driver

Sci-fi fans will have a field day enumerating “Midnight Special’s” antecedents. The dweeby government scientist (Adam Driver…again) on Elton’s trail?  He’s first cousin to Francois Truffaut’s French egghead in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and to Keys (played by Peter Coyote) in “E.T.”

The weirdly gifted individual being sought by both authorities and corrupt private interests? Take your pick from movies as varied as “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “Starman.”

The supernaturally gifted kid with glowing eyes? “Village of the Damned.”

The preassigned meeting in which all (well, most) questions will be answered?  Yeah, yeah, been there before.

And when the little party of fugitives is joined by Elton’s mother (Kirsten Dunst), “Midnight Special” takes on the trappings of a religious allegory — the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt.

Despite all this recycled sic-fi, the film pulls us in because Nichols is way more interested in human relationships than in special effects. The love of Roy and Sarah for their child — and the possibility that they may have to give him up to a higher calling — is vastly more compelling than the plot’s hokey embrace of parallel universes.

And the performances!  We are accustomed to fantasy being played with a bit of tongue in cheek, but all involved here sell their characters as real flesh-and-blood individuals beset by fears yet held together by love.

That core of human emotion elevates the film above its last-act f/x excesses and makes it a unexpectedly moving experience.

| Robert W. Butler