The Peanut But­ter Falcon

In June 2018 crit­ic David Ehrlich coined the term ​“nicecore” to describe a recent spate of films that prized kind­ness over con­flict. He cit­ed exam­ples such as Padding­ton 2 and Hearts Beat Loud as respons­es to the ongo­ing state of West­ern polit­i­cal freefall, imag­in­ing a world dri­ven by altru­ism rather than apa­thy, where peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly just and good, and a hap­py end­ing is nev­er far away. Some 15 months lat­er the world is still in a state of chaos, but at the movies, sto­ries about the tri­umph of con­ge­nial­i­ty in the face of adver­si­ty con­tin­ue to appear.

Tyler Nil­son and Michael Schwartz’s direc­to­r­i­al debut, The Peanut But­ter Fal­con, fits neat­ly into this bur­geon­ing sub-genre, telling of Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a young man with Down syn­drome who devel­ops an unlike­ly friend­ship with a surly drifter named Tyler (Shia LaBeouf). Hav­ing spent his whole life con­fined to care homes, Zak is list­less and bored, spend­ing his days under the watch of his sym­pa­thet­ic but frus­trat­ed car­er Eleanor (Dako­ta John­son), think­ing of escape plans so he might flee and ful­fil his dream of becom­ing a wrestler.

Aid­ed by his room­mate Carl (Bruce Dern in a charm­ing minor role) he makes his bid for free­dom, and runs into Tyler, him­self on the run after caus­ing some trou­ble of his own. Togeth­er they set off, a mod­ern-day Tom Sawyer and Huck­le­ber­ry Finn, tra­vers­ing the marsh­lands of the Deep South.

It’s a famil­iar sto­ry of mis­fits on the run, but Gottsagen and LaBeouf’s easy chem­istry ele­vates the source mate­r­i­al, and Thomas Hay­den Church runs a fine line as Zak’s griz­zled wrestling hero The Salt Water Red­neck; John­son, sad­ly, isn’t giv­en much to do. It’s a sweet sto­ry told with unfail­ing earnest­ness and lift­ed by ten­der per­for­mances, but its pre­dictabil­i­ty and mean­der­ing pace hin­der it from real­ly deliv­er­ing the great­ness Zak him­self is so obsessed with. It’s ​“nicecore” alright, but some­times being nice just isn’t enough.