Asleep in My Palm

Tim Blake Nelson teams up with his filmmaker son for this quietly observant tale of a father and daughter living on the dark, overlooked fringes of society.

“Asleep in My Palm” is set during the winter in a rural Ohio town containing a small liberal arts college. I thought the setting familiar, and it turns out it was shot at Oberlin College, where I went for two years. As seen in the film, it’s a dreary, snowy landscape populated by haves and have-nots, aka privileged students/faculty and the townies who largely depend on the former.

The film is written and directed by Henry Nelson, an Oberlin grad and son of Tim Blake Nelson, who stars and produced. It’s the younger Nelson’s first feature as a filmmaker, leaving him open to the “nepo baby” knock that’s all the rage.

My take is everybody has some sort of privilege, and it’s more about what you do with it. If the kid of a respected character actor uses his dad’s influence and participation to make a good movie, then so be it.

And “Palm” is that, a quietly observant tale about a father and teen daughter living on the dark, overlooked fringes of society, both figuratively and literally.

Tom (Tim Blake Nelson) and his 16-year-old daughter, Beth Anne (Chloë Kerwin), live illegally in a storage unit that’s maybe about 20 feet by 12 feet. They have beds, a rigged-up light system, a hot plate for some cooking, some castoff clothing and a few odds and ends. They use local store bathrooms for their business and will bluff their way into one of the college dorms for showers.

They’re technically homeless but are very organized about it. Beth Anne does not go to school, though her dad is providing her with a personalized education, from a dissertation on the similarities between the Abrahamic religions to defensive fighting skills.

With his owlish glasses and street smarts, it’s clear Tom is an educated guy who lives outside of conventional society by choice. We gather that their current living situation is just the most recent in a long continuum of such locales.

They get money by selling things, items that other people do not want or need. In many cases Tom takes it upon himself to decide which things other people do not really need. He spends an entire night using bolt cutters to round up a half-dozen girls’ bicycles from various racks around the college.

Most people would call this stealing, but Tom and Beth Anne think of themselves as expert scroungers, liberating under-utilized goods and repurposing them to others with more need. Interestingly, their activities closely align with the attitudes of the very students they’re taking from, bourgeois Marxists from the coasts who will spout about the evils of capitalism while wearing designer clothes their parents paid for.

(Gosh knows how many of this type I ran into at Oberlin, and elsewhere… often while laboring at work-study jobs.)

At 88 minutes, “Palm” is not so much a defined narrative as an ongoing observation of these two characters, their tight-knit relationship and the circumstances in which they find themselves. A series of encounters over the course of a single night and day will have a profound impact on the nature of their little family.

Jose (Jared Abrahamson) is an odd, vaguely disquieting fellow with whom Tom does business. With his newly shaved head and wild stare, he seems like an overeager puppy, deeply lonely and desperate to form friendships, but capable of ugly mood swings when rejected. He also makes oblique references to Beth Anne’s maturation as a woman that leave Tom unsettled.

For her part, Beth Anne has spent all her life observing from the edges of the college and places like it, and she’s feeling the yearning to spread her wings beyond her father’s protective nest. A chance encounter with Millah (Gus Birney), a partying student, leads to an emotional and sexual awakening that stuns her with the force of its arrival.

There’s also Dark Mortius, a self-dubbed former student played by Grant Harvey. A former lacrosse star, he now subsists as a sort of down-market Satanic cult leader, leading around small troupes of students for booze-and-drug binges in the same dark bowels of the college buildings where Tom and Beth Anne often reconnoiter.

Like the frozen outdoors, the tone of “Asleep in My Palm” is very bleak, but also with notes of affirmation and uplift. Tom has done a very good job of teaching Beth Anne to be strong and resourceful, but at the expense of her ability to form bonds with anyone other than him. We can sense the authentic love he has for his daughter, but also the cloying codependency it has fostered.

Nelson the elder gives a centered, slightly unnerving performance as Tom, a man who has made rejection the foundation of his life, a baleful disdain for everything except the young woman he’s raising. Kerwin comes to the fore in the second half, and makes Beth Anne such an emotionally vibrant character we want to follow her anywhere.

Some may find it a bit slow-moving, but it’s the sort of filmmaking that’s less about ‘what happens’ and more about seeing this small set of people in all their peculiarity and purpose.

“Asleep in My Palm” will hit select theaters March 1, on VOD March 19 and streaming April 19.