The best scene in "The Astronaut Farmer" is the first one: a man in a space suit astride a horse, searching the Texas grasslands for a lost calf.
It's an interesting image, combining the iconography of the cowboy and the spaceman (shades of "Toy Story") - archetypes essential to a nation that's always had an eye on the next frontier.
The point that twin-brother writer-directors Mark and Michael Polish make in "The Astronaut Farmer" is that as the country loses interest in these icons, it loses an important piece of its sense of self. The American dream has always been aspirational; once we lose our sense that anything is possible, the movie argues, we've lost our way.
The dreamer in question is Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton), a Texas rancher and former astronaut candidate who's building a rocket in the barn behind his house. He intends to ride the rocket into space, a project that exhausts his family's finances (foreclosure looms) as he gets close to liftoff.
All he needs is fuel, but when he intends to purchase a large quantity of it, he attracts the attention of the FBI and Federal Aviation Administration, which institute proceedings to shut him down.
This is pretty familiar movie territory - bureaucrats looming as the enemy of the free-thinking individual. And there are other bogeymen - educators who no longer value science, psychiatrists who want to label every maverick as a crazy man.
"The Astronaut Farmer," alas, is a movie with a surplus of intriguing ideas but a deficit of credibility. We understand the movie is intended as something of a fable; still, it's a pretty far-fetched premise, and the Polish brothers never really sell us on the reality of the machine in Farmer's back yard.
The brothers needed to spend more time on the mechanical details that would have made the rocket seem as if it might actually work - more scenes of Farmer working on his spacecraft, which might have conferred needed gravity (pardon the pun) both to Farmer and his homemade rocket. Something like the scene in "Apollo 13," wherein Ed Harris dumps a bunch of spare parts on a table and tells his engineers to construct an air pump.
"The Astronaut Farmer" also takes what feels like a big narrative misstep just as it tries to achieve its own liftoff, delaying what should have been a can't-miss visual payoff and adding further to problems of credibility.
One final thing: We take it as an article of faith here that Farmer, the former NASA man, is of sound mind. You couldn't make it all the way through the space program and be nutty as a fruitcake, right?
"The Astronaut Farmer" might have found a more receptive audience a few months ago, before the traditional image of the astronaut was expanded to include pepper spray and diapers. *
Produced by Mark Polish, Paula Weinstein, Len Amato and Michael Polish, directed by Michael Polish, written by Mark Polish and Michael Polish, distributed by Warner Bros.