“The Peanut Butter Falcon” (PG) ** and a half

ZACHARY Gottsagen is a 38-year-old with Down syndrome. This film, written and directed by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, is his third. 

He’s an engaging man whose impairment, while visible, seems not to be a barrier to earning a living in the industry that lives by exposing real people to world attention by exposing them as other people.

This film has been publicised as a kind of 21st century Huckleberry Finn tale. The connection is minimal. It’s amusing, but not a full-on comedy. It’s warm-hearted but not effusively so. It’s a thriller but only on a very minor scale. 

What’s the most perceptive way of categorising it? How about a kind of amusing Huck Finn-ish dramatic comedy about a young Down syndrome man whose hero is a TV wrestler, escaping from a care facility wearing only underpants, falls in with a guy (Shia LaBeouf) who steals crabs from other fishermen’s pots, gets chased by the owners of the pots and flees down river in a raft, joined by the pretty young care facility volunteer (Dakota Johnson) who’s been told not to come back until she finds him?

There’s more than those few way-points; the film’s ultimate intention appears to be to scratch poverty and find merit in human kindness. There’s not a nasty bone in its body, not even from the pair of pursuers whose crab pots have been robbed. But credibility in other elements of the story does get stretched a bit far and the denouement doesn’t resolve anything.

And the explanation of that quirky title is heart-warming.

At Dendy and Palace Electric