‘Asleep in My Palm’ is a well-done debut from Henry Nelson

The film, starring Tim Blake Nelson and directed by his son, is the best version of a familiar sub-genre.

There is a specific subgenre of indie film in which the plot is “a young girl or woman grows up, in relatively precarious circumstances, along with her charismatic but troubled and possibly problematic single father.” 

This, more or less, was the plot of Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic, Alex Lehman’s Acidman, and Daniel Desson Cretton’s The Glass Castle. Sure, some of those movies had other siblings or a mother character in the picture at some point, but overall, the films are similar. 

It’s a popular genre, partly because it’s often based on a famous novel or memoir, and because it allows for a big and showy performance for the actor playing the father, which in the above movies were (respectively) Ben Foster, Viggo Mortensen, Thomas Haden Church, and Woody Harrelson. 

The new Asleep in My Palm is the best of this genre. It has no significant literary pedigree, nor does the actor give an especially big performance. But it’s a harrowing, well-acted picture about a father and daughter on the edge. 

Directed by Henry Nelson in his debut, the film stars the director’s father, Tim Blake Nelson, as Tom, a war veteran living in a state of near-homelessness in a storage unit on the outskirts of a college town in Ohio, where he steals bikes from campus and sells them. With him is his 16-year-old daughter Beth Anne (Chloë Kerwin), who, in addition to her precarious circumstances, is trying to figure things out sexually. 

Tom is witty and erudite, but there are hints that he’s also been through some bad things and probably done them. As serious as the subject matter is, there is room for some levity, including a discussion of whether it’s okay for women to like the Radiohead song “Creep.” 

Tim Blake Nelson does some of the best work of his career, not playing the character as a larger-than-life personality, unlike everyone else who has played that sort of part in this type of movie. But the real motivation is Kerwin, who nails a tricky role. s

Nelson, of course, is a perennial of the Coen Brothers’ work, and in 2016, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs began with its best segment, which featured Tim Blake Nelson in a hilarious singing-cowboy tableau. 

Asleep in My Palm also begins with a great scene that sets the tone and will likely go down as the thing that’s remembered most about the film. Tim recites a ridiculously profane version of the “Chicken Little” story to his daughter, stretching it out in the wildest way possible (“There’s this little fucker named Foxy Loxy.”) 

There are parallels to the movie we’re watching- and not only because, after this seven-minute scene, comes the revelation that their “home” is a storage unit. 

The two best parts of the film are the beginning and ending. The ending is simultaneously a considerable gut punch and, surprisingly, a representation of hope.

 Tim Blake Nelson is also a director, and Holocaust film historian Rich Brownstein has described his 2021 film The Grey Zone as the best Holocaust movie of all time. With Asleep in My Palm, his son shows his promise as a filmmaker. 

Asleep in My Palm opens in some theaters on March 1, before landing on VOD on March 19.