Timberlake’s Eddie Palmer is a former hometown hero whose football career ended after just a year of college ball. Bad choices and a weakness for pain pills led him to prison, but he did his time without complaint; returning to small-town Louisiana, he’s willing to start at the bottom to make a new life.

He moves in with the grandmother Vivian who raised him. Vivian (June Squibb) insists on church-going and isn’t about to coddle her boy: Most of her maternal energies are now needed by Sam (Ryder Allen), the son of the woman who rents a trailer in her side yard. Temple’s Shelly loves Sam but isn’t equipped to juggle an addiction, an angry boyfriend and a kid. She often vanishes for days or weeks, leaving Vivian his de facto family. Shelly’s on a long one of these benders when Vivian dies.

As is customary in these stories, Palmer has no desire to be saddled with childcare. He’s maybe even a little disgusted by this kid in particular. Sam wears barrettes and plays with dolls. But seeing others harass the child is all it takes to make Palmer set his annoyance aside. This is a town of schoolyard bullies and Sunday-morning gossips, and Cheryl Guerriero’s script shows admirable restraint in letting us draw our own comparisons between the plight of the felon and the gender nonconformist.

Palmer gets it. And, since the only job in town he can nab is as a school janitor, he gets to keep tabs on Sam both day and night. His attentiveness is inevitably noticed by Sam’s pretty, divorced teacher Miss Maggie (Alisha Wainwright), who volunteers her assistance with Sam’s care. The two adults deserve some kind of minor award for managing to spend as much time as they do together pretending they’re only interested in taking care of the kid.

Timberlake plots a credible line from a prisoner’s taciturn self-protectiveness through the humility of freedom-with-limits to the dawning of a possible new life. Palmer’s not an especially well-drawn character, but he feels real enough to fight for Sam when the time comes. Director Stevens doesn’t play the tearjerker card shamelessly, as many of his predecessors have in similar instances. But the film has little trouble getting us on Palmer’s side, and hoping the powers that be will come around and make him a dad.