James Mottern's Trucker features spectacular performances but these excellent actors are required to do too much heavy lifting with a script that plays out too predictably to be effective. Anyone who has spent time with their TV sets tuned to The Sundance Chanel could practically write every scene and character arc in Trucker from the plot description alone. But if a film is predictable does that make it bad? Yes. There should have been a few more moments in Trucker that didn't feel cribbed from "Independent Drama 101," but it seems clear that Mottern is more interested in actors and their characters than anything else. The film is visually inert and doesn't build like it should but it does feature a uniformly strong ensemble including at least two stellar lead performances and a few great supporting ones as well. Fans of acting should take a look but it's a shame that performances this strong couldn't have been used as ingredients in a more complete film.

Michelle Monaghan has been an interesting, multi-faceted actress for a few years now, able to look strikingly beautiful in something like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and also genuinely tough in films like North Country and Gone Baby Gone. She's been "one to watch" for a few films. And, now, she comes through with the best performance of her career as Diane Ford, a hard-living long-haul truck driver. Diane lives a life of complete freedom, jumping from casual sexual encounter to drunken night at the bar and back behind the wheel of her rig with ease. Nothing ties her down and her only real connection is that with her friend Runner (Nathan Fillion), a sweet guy who clearly wants to be more than friends but Diane would rather sleep with strangers than be a homewrecker. Of course, Trucker will be about Diane discovering another speed bump to tie her down on the road of life.

Everything changes for Diane when Jenny (Joey Lauren Adams) drops by one night with Peter (Jimmy Bennett), Diane's eleven-year-old son. It turns out that Diane left Peter with his father (an effective Benjamin Bratt in a small role) years ago with the understanding that she simply wouldn't be a part of his life. Things have to change when Diane's baby daddy comes down with cancer and, while in the hospital, his gal Jenny has to go home to deal with a family crisis of her own. Diane and Peter are forced to get along for at least a few days which, of course, stretches longer and the absent mother and petulant child are stuck together.

A story of a blue-collar, sexually active, borderline alcoholic woman coming to terms with responsibility through the eyes of an eleven-year-old is simply something that we've seen too many times for it to be truly effective. Mottern tries admirably to leave manipulation and melodrama out of the piece, but it's just too easy to know that Diane is going to learn a lesson from this pre-teen made older than his years due to a dying father and a bitch of a mother. The film doesn't play out like the Lifetime movie of the week that it might have in someone else's hands but it's not far enough from that on a script level to be truly memorable. The story of Diane and Peter will linger solely because of what the actors bring to them as characters more than anything that was written for them in the plot of Trucker.

And that's a credit to Monaghan and Bennett. For the record, Fillion and Bratt are great in small roles, but the film belongs to Michelle and Jimmy (who, as Roger Ebert recently pointed out, really should start going by James soon if he wants to transition to adult film work in the next decade). Monaghan knows that she is responsible for keeping the melodrama at bay and doesn't play Diane nearly as over-the-top as a lot of other actresses would have. She simply feels genuine, something challenging for a script that feels so generic. And Bennett, who has popped all year in films as different as Orphan and Shorts, truly gives one of the best child performances of the last few years, finding shades to Peter that anchor the film as much as Monaghan's work. Monaghan and Bennett are better than the film as a whole and their performances hint at great things still to come from these two intriguing actors. Their work alone almost makes Trucker worth the trip.

Rating: TWO AND A HALF BONES

Release Date: Opened October 2nd, 2009 in New York; October 9th, 2009 in Los Angeles; Expanding Wide Later This Month
Rating: R

Starring: Michelle Monaghan, Jimmy Bennett, Nathan Fillion, Joey Lauren Adams, and Benjamin Bratt
Director: James Mottern
Writer: James Mottern