Borrowing pages from Charly and Rain Man, Sean Penn fills the title role as a mentally retarded adult who works in a Starbucks mopping up tables and muttering coffee-drink recipes. After work one day, he sprints off to the hospital, where a vagrant woman who once spent a night at his apartment gives birth. She gets cleaned up and heads off on her way, leaving Sam with a newborn daughter.

Seven years later, Sam and said daughter (Dakota Fanning) are at the same mental stage, and child-care authorities are itching to put her in a foster home so she can develop under healthier intellectual conditions. Through idiot savant badgering, Sam retains a high-powered attorney (the ever-radiant Michelle Pfeiffer), who herself, as a result of a dysfunctional marriage and job stress, is broken on the inside. What ensues is a bittersweet courtroom drama cheaply reminiscent of Kramer vs. Kramer (the film, all too aware of the allusion, bestows on Sam a quartet of mentally handicapped buddies who obsess over videos and quote lines from the movie at inappropriate junctures). Directed amateurishly by Jessie Nelson in a series of contrived, maudlin manipulations, the film nonetheless achieves poignance thanks to the masterful performances by Penn, Pfeiffer, and the adorable Fanning, whose big blue eyes are enough to disarm even the most stoic of stoics.