Emotional, modern Huck Finn odyssey

‘THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON’ ★★★

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic content, language throughout, some violence and smoking)

Running time: 1:33

Money’s useful. But you don’t need ridiculous amounts of it to make a film with interesting characters, compelling actors and a story bringing something old and something new to the table.

“The Peanut Butter Falcon” reminds us of this, while introducing a beguiling screen newcomer, Zack Gottsagen, who has studied acting for much of his life and now has the audience he deserves.

“I am a Down syndrome,” his character, called Zak, declares at one point. Gottsagen, whom the filmmakers met while volunteering years ago at a California theater camp, likewise has Down syndrome. In “The Peanut Butter Falcon” Zak escapes his old life to pursue a new, uncharted one, and by the time he says this line, spoken at a crossroads moment of fear and self-doubt, we know a few things about him.

Confined to a residential nursing home, Zak has a friend and sounding board in Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), who works at the facility that has labeled Zak a “flight risk.” Zak’s roommate (Bruce Dern) complains that Zak has just about worn out an old VHS tape of his favorite pro wrestler, the fearsome “Salt Water Redneck” (Thomas Haden Church), hawking his school for aspiring WWE competitors.

Zak’s dream is to find the Salt Water Redneck and become his next great protégé. Sneaking away one night, with his roommate’s delighted encouragement, Zak ends up hiding in a boat somewhere in the Outer Banks region of North Carolina. The boat, the property of a crab fisherman (John Hawkes in a role too tight for his talent), is conveniently stolen, with Zak still hiding under a tarp. The thief is a desperate fellow crabber, Tyler, played by Shia LaBeouf. He’s consistently good screen company here, scaling his itchy, restless but companionable characterization to the ambling requirements of a road movie.

He and Gottsagen are basically the whole show, and their rapport feels genuine, easy-breathing and intuitively right. The movie around and underneath them is more uneven. It lays out its conflicts and pursuits plainly. The influences start with Mark Twain and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” with Tyler and Zak’s relationship wary and adversarial at first, then warming to a place of mutual affection and respect. They trade the boat for a raft. Eleanor joins them. Eventually Zak comes face-to-face with his wrestling idol, and a climactic bout hands Zak and the audience the wish-fulfillment they crave.

The writers-directors are Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz, making their feature directorial debuts.

The movie, produced by Chicago native Albert Berger (“Little Miss Sunshine”) and several other true believers, was shot in Georgia in 2017. In the writing and the direction, parts of “The Peanut Butter Falcon” lack finesse and lean into narrative coincidence and obviousness. The staging of the climax feels awkward and uncertain; it isn’t what the characters deserve. Yet by that time the actors have done enough to take your mind off the limitations of technique. At its best this bighearted picture recalls the setting, and feeling, of Jeff Nichols’ Huck Finn-indebted coming-of-age fable “Mud.”

Too often in American movies, filmmakers bland out any sense of specific geography or rural texture in the name of “universality.” Unrelated: For too long, in American movies and every other kind, we’ve a character pegged as “disabled” in one way or another, goes to a wellknown, abled-bodied actor whose performance becomes a self-conscious display of well-meaning fraudulence.

Gottsagen is not disabled. He has Down syndrome. He is also as ablebodied and innately appealing a screen performer as we’ve seen in 2019.