As a rule, child actors work from a limited palette—and even good performances require skillful coaxing from the director—but they're often particularly bad at hitting the subtle registers needed to suggest a complex inner life, probably because they don't yet have one. Those who try tend to come off as unbearably precocious. So it's unfair to blame 10-year-old Eric Lloyd for his leaden, atrocious line readings in Luminous Motion, director Bette Gordon's stilted allegory about a boy, his free-spirited single mother, and their shared love of the highway. But, then again, Lloyd is saddled with a role that would vex the most seasoned performer, with laughably portentous voiceovers ("We were like a quality of landscape") and a script that favors forced thematic devices over recognizable human emotion. Equal parts Oedipal conflict, feminist tract, and tale of innocence lost, Luminous Motion sets up an intriguing symbiosis between Lloyd and his sad, self-destructive mother, played with strung-out sultriness by Deborah Kara Unger (Crash). Together, they aimlessly tour the country in a red Chevy Impala, thieving credit cards and hotel televisions for money and obtaining shelter from Unger's endless series of one-night stands. For Lloyd, life in constant motion is a rapturous, otherworldly pleasure, so much so that he fails to notice his mother's desperation and misery. But Luminous Motion takes a wrong turn once it gets off the road, introducing two men who exist primarily to serve as heavy-handed symbols: One is a stable boyfriend (Terry Kinney) who ignites the boy's Oedipal rage, while the other is a long-lost father (Jamey Sheridan) who all too clearly represents patriarchal oppression. It's been a long time since Gordon made her last feature, 1983's Variety, but Luminous Motion exhibits many of the same problems, forsaking credible relationships for a thematic agenda that's pretentious and forced. At its nadir, Variety resorted to a montage of handshakes to condemn male-dominated society; in the years since, Gordon's touch hasn't gotten any softer.