The film opens on a local news broadcast playing on the television inside a Texas roadside motel room. From it we glean an Amber Alert has been issued for eight-year-old Alton Meyer and that his alleged abductor is one Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon).
As the camera pulls back inside the room, we spy Roy loading a shotgun into a bag and another man (Joel Edgerton) securing cardboard over the window and peephole. Sitting in the center of the room, reading a comic by flashlight under a bed sheet, is Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), goggles over his eyes, construction-grade headphones over his ears. Roy tells him it's time and soon the three are hitting the road under the cover of darkness.
We soon learn Roy is Alton's father and the two have fled a religious cult that had been exploiting the boy as a pseudo-messiah. You see Alton is special, prone to speaking in odd tounges and light bursts shooting from his eyes. With the help of childhood friend Lucas (Edgerton), Roy is determined to get Alton to a secret location where something remarkable may or may not happen.
It isn't long before cult members and the government (led by Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Adam Driver) are pursuing the trio across the highways and in the shadows of the American South.
Midnight Special definitely has a Close Encounters/E.T. vibe about it, albeit a little more intense and enigmatic. But it's those qualities that provide an engaging, contemporary freshness to the tale and set Nichols' film on its own path away from those Spielberg classics.
Shannon, Edgerton and Driver all give solid, memorable performances and Kirsten Dunst provides a nice, quiet turn as Alton's excommunicated mother.
The only complaint is that Alton's powers are really never explained, other than they mirror beings who inhabit a world "on top" of our world. And when that world is eventually revealed, it resembles a utopia straight out of last year's ill-fated Disney debacle Tomorrowland.
Those quibbles aside, Midnight Special is a satisfying, deeply layered and highly effective piece of cinema, one that makes you look forward to what Jeff Nichols does next. Grade: B+
