From left, Luke Evans, Christopher Woodley, and Billy Porter in Our Son (Vertical)

Our Son, a relatively somber film, centers almost equally on a custody battle and the divorce that sets the action in motion. Full of excellent performances and some sleek locations and camerawork, it still falters because of a weak, pedestrian script.

Gabriel (Billy Porter) and Nicky (Luke Evans) have been married for 13 years, and they have an eight-year-old son, Owen (Christopher Woodley). Gabriel is the main caregiver—loving and attentive, maybe to a fault. Nicky, a workaholic book publisher, tends to bottle his feelings. After a short introduction of typical, minor marital spats, such as whether to allow Owen to sleep in their bed at night, Gabriel announces he has a lover and isn’t happy. Nicky is blindsided, but willing to work through it, but Gabriel is obstinate. He wants a divorce.

We barely get to know the characters aside from some broad strokes before the drama kicks in. This leaves us attempting to catch up with the narrative. Why is Gabriel unhappy? We don’t know. To the film’s credit, neither does Gabriel. But this isn’t like Kramer vs. Kramer, where Meryl Streep says she is unhappy and leaves for most of the duration of that film. Gabriel is a main character. Aside from a touching scene with his mother, played by the invaluable Phylicia Rashad, we don’t get much of a grasp of Gabriel. It takes a lot to make a performer like Billy Porter dull and uninteresting, but Our Son does just that.

Evans fares better simply because Nicky has an inner conflict. Because of Gabriel’s leaving and his demand for primary custody, Nicky has to do some self-examining. He felt that providing for his family was a sufficient avenue for expressing his love for them. Evans’s performance is perfectly calibrated, particularly toward the end as he plunges into the night in confusion and finds himself in the kind of club that he hadn’t been to for a decade and a half.

Director/co-writer Bill Oliver knows how to move things along in a compact film that has few extraneous digressions. The camerawork and production design are also sleek and efficient, mirroring the upper-class world the men move through. There’s actually a lot to like about this film. The acting is superb. The subject matter is interesting and relatively fresh. Nevertheless, the script is the issue. There are far too many moments of clichéd dialogue, weak character development, and some fairly unbelievable moments. During the custody negotiations, Nicky and Gabriel go at it while the attorneys sit meekly wait for the diatribes to end; Nicky manages to park his Lexus directly in front of his brownstone, which, as any New Yorker can tell you, never happens. It’s these sorts of lazy shortcuts that cut into its more realistic and interesting moments. Ultimately, Our Son is a film with commendable intentions and good enough to make you wish it were better.