Schuyler Fisk in Sam & Kate (Vertical Entertainment)

Writer/director Darren Le Gallo’s debut feature film is a sensitively drawn if somewhat middling throwback to the dramedies of the 1980s and 1990s. It fittingly opens with Dustin Hoffman’s Bill roaming the aisles of a discount outlet, awkwardly and aimlessly in an electric stroller as America’s “You Can Do Magic” plays over the speakers. The opening encapsulates much of the movie: its lightly comic tone and its imperfect characters going around in circles in their lives.

Hoffman’s own son Jake Hoffman plays Bill’s son, Sam, who calls his father by his first name: Bill believes grown men should refer to their fathers on a first name basis. It’s a cold reminder to Sam that he hasn’t really gone anywhere with his life: Despite being a talented artist sketching away in his notebook, he lives with his ailing, cantankerous father and works a dull job in chocolate factory alongside goofy pothead musician Ron (Henry Thomas). On the downtown strip of their small Southern hamlet, Sam works up the nerve to talk to Kate (Schuyler Fisk), who owns the town bookshop. Soon Sam and Bill’s worlds further collide with Kate and her mother, Tina (Sissy Spacek, who is the real-life mother of Fisk), after a Christmas Eve church service.

What ensues is a somewhat predictable symmetrical duet of love stories weighed down by personal tragedies. While the lackadaisical tone is welcome, Le Gallo’s plot structure is a bit too slow-moving and pat: Bill’s fate and Kate’s past become stilted schematic plot devices to deepen drama and create conflict, but ultimately aren’t surprising. Tina, who lives alone in a house of hastily covered windows, is a hoarder (she refers to herself more humbly as “a collector”)—the score by Roger O’Donnell provides a gently ominous undertone at the first glimpse of her situation.

There is a certain flatness to Sam & Kate that doesn’t aid in moving the story along. The camerawork of Frank G. DeMarco, who has done much more vivid work on Robert Redford’s All Is Lost and John Cameron Mitchell’s films, is unremarkable. However, what helps buoy the film are the actors. The movie hinges a bit, perhaps too strongly, on its casting. What could conceivably be too precious pairings of real-life father/son and mother/daughter ends up working well. Jake’s performance of wide-eyed, shaggy-haired Sam is a pleasing blend of earnestness and awkwardness. Fisk, understated and warm, has an endearing presence, and shows off some of her musical talent as well with a sweetly sung original song.

Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek are, of course, pros. Hoffman can somehow crystalize in a single look what feels like decades of sorrow. His tendency toward shouty excessiveness is hemmed in a bit by his son’s turn, and their contrasting characters’ banter has a likeable ebb and flow. Spacek is particularly excellent as a seemingly charming Southern church lady, whose offhanded laughter has undercurrents of bitterness, loneliness, and ache. A character study of Tina could comprise an entire film alone. The chemistry of the four performers together lifts what could have been a completely saccharine, unpalatable tale.