Jaeden Liberher and Michael Shannon (Warner Bros. Pictures)

A father takes his son on a long car trip, desperate to make the boy’s wishes come true. Getting there is an intermittently thrilling ride, yet in the science fiction drama Midnight Special, the destination may not be as satisfying as the journey.

As the movie opens, Roy (Michael Shannon) is hiding out in a Texas motel room. He’s on the run, and local TV news is broadcasting the strangely outdated picture of a fugitive with the steadfast and uncertainly menacing look of, well, Michael Shannon. With the help of his Texas state trooper friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), Roy has abducted his own son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), who has special powers that makes him a valuable asset to two diametrically opposed groups: a Texas ranch populated by a religious cult that thinks that the strange proclamations that emerge from the boy’s seizures are the word of God; and government agents who wonder how the boy is able to divine certain government secrets.

While Edgerton essentially plays a chisel-featured sidekick, the reliable Shannon takes his formidable, Munster-like features and shapes a stoic but sympathetic human being. He lends an anxious power to a man who wants to protect his son at all costs. After Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Adam Driver resonates in another father-son movie dynamic. He is Paul Sevier, the young NSA agent who helps the FBI track down the wunderkind and his protective captors. Although he works for The Man, he’s sympathetic to Roy and his young charge, and if Midnight Special ends up resembling Close Encounters, Driver is vaguely the Richard Dreyfuss of this movie.

Yet the center of the film feels like a human MacGuffin. Alton barely registers as a human, much less a vulnerable child. Even if this is by design, a kid whose eyes shoot out powerful light beams when he goes into apocalyptic fits doesn’t resonate nearly as much as the father that simply wants to protect him. This paranoid drama has a human element, but much as the government threatens to tear this family apart, the movie’s science fiction ambitions seem to undermine the intimate family plot at the film’s core.

Well-shot and sensitively acted, Midnight Special bears some resemblance to director Jeff Nichol’s 2011 film Take Shelter, in which Shannon, a Nichols regular, plays a man with apocalyptic visions that we are not sure are real or imagined. The supernatural element of Midnight Special is more explicit, but the film’s real drama lies in a father’s belief in his son and disbelief in the system (both religious and federal) that wants to use the boy’s powers for their own benefit.

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Midnight Special
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols
With Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver, Kristen Dunst, Jaeden Lieberher
Rated PG-13 for some violence and action
111 minutes
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema, the AFI Silver, and ArcLight Bethesda.