Even if you knew nothing else about it, the title alone would prevent you from getting sucked in by the film's opening image, a silhouette of a horseback rider on the crest of a hill at sunrise, an evocation of a complete screen mythology and a prompt of happy moviegoing memories. The full light of day, alas, reveals an absurdist vision of a mounted spaceman, a "space cowboy" as he will mandatorily be labelled on the television news, or more prosaically a Texas rancher named Farmer, who has clung to his dream of space travel long after he dropped out of the NASA training program -- "If we don't have our dreams, we have nothing" -- and accordingly has hocked the ranch in order to build a private rocket ship in the barn. Though his family unconcernedly humors him, and his neighbors shake their heads ("He's more of an astro-nut if you ask me"), and the feds finally step in to trample the dream, the character is clearly intended to be an inspiration rather than a caution, a neo-Capra Little Man played with holy-fool earnestness by Billy Bob Thornton, albeit without the personal magnetism of a Jimmy Stewart or a Gary Cooper, in fact with a reptilian repellence distinctly his own. That notwithstanding, he's a much squarer creation -- he, and the movie around him -- than we've grown accustomed to expect from the filmmaking team of the twin Polish brothers, Michael and Mark, of Twin Falls Idaho and Jackpot and Northfork. The mainstream insistently beckons. And these certified oddballs, while ostensibly lionizing an oddball, do so in suits and ties. Virginia Madsen, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce Dern, J.K. Simmons. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd