I Am Sam
The film also features three people, with disabilities, who are playing themselves: Brad Silverman, Joe Rosenberg, and Brian Bialick, all of them are in a group called L.A. GOAL (Greater Opportunities for the Advanced Living), a social organization that deals with adults with developmental disabilities.
Sean Penn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the film.
Synopsis
Sam Dawson (Sean Penn), a mentally challenged man with a mind of a child, is living in Los Angeles and is single-handedly raising his daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning), whom he fathered from a homeless woman who wanted nothing to do with Lucy and left him the day of her birth.
Although Sam provides a loving and caring environment for the 7-year-old Lucy, she soon surpasses her father's mental capacity. Questions arise about Sam’s ability to care for Lucy and a custody case is brought to court.
Sam is a man with a mental age of 7 who is well adjusted and has a great support system consisting of four similarly developmentally disabled men.
His neighbor Annie (Dianne Wiest), a piano-player and agoraphobe, befriends Sam and takes care of Lucy when Sam can't.
Sam works at Starbucks bussing tables. Sam is popular with the customers, whom he addresses by name and favorite coffee.
His job gets difficult when Lucy starts grabbing objects, making a woman spill iced coffee down her shirt. In a humorous, but innocent exchange, Sam tries to remove an ice cube from the startled woman's cleavage.
Sam then brings Lucy to his neighbor and baby Lucy croons, "Annie!" Sam says, "Her first word was Annie." Flustered but flattered, she retorts, "And people worry you aren't smart," and agrees to function as Lucy's babysitter.
Lucy is as precocious as Sam is backwards. Seuss to her, but when she starts reading "real hard" books like Stellaluna, she balks at reading the word "different" because she doesn't want to be smarter than her dad.
She knows he's different, "not like other dads", but that's all right with her because he is loving, taking her to the park and to International House of Pancakes (every Wednesday, because "Wednesday is IHOP night").
When they decide to go to Big Boy for a change, Sam causes a disturbance because he cannot get the kind of French pancakes he is accustomed to. At the school Halloween party, he dresses as Paul McCartney but embarrasses his daughter by drawing undue attention.
This causes a crisis at her birthday party, which results in an unexpected visit from a social worker who takes Lucy away. A judge allows him only two supervised, 2-hour visits per week.
Sam's friends recommend that he hire Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer), a lawyer.
Socially, Sam is rather high-functioning—more together in many ways than his high-class, respected lawyer whose marriage is falling apart and whose son hates her.
Sam surprises Rita at a party. Over the course of the trial, Sam gets a new job at Pizza Hut and Annie leaves her apartment for the first time in years.
Sam also convinces her to leave her husband, because Rita told him that he cheated on her.
During the trial, however, Sam breaks down, after being convinced that he is not capable of taking care of Lucy.
Meanwhile, Lucy is placed with a foster family who plan to adopt her. The movie ends with Lucy's soccer game where Sam is the referee.
Should the rights have been purchased, it would have cost $4.5 million dollars, which would have set a record in terms of money paid for songs in a Hollywood production. Instead, Penn commissioned other artists, such as Stereophonics, Eddie Vedder, Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Rufus Wainwright, The Wallflowers, Ben Harper, The Vines, and Ben Folds, to cover the songs for the soundtrack.
Song uses
Sam's daughter is named after the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
At the Halloween party "I'm Looking Through You" drives home the point that Sam is "not the same" as other adults. Sam's lawyer's name comes from the Beatles song "Lovely Rita", a point made by Lucy.
At the end of the film "Two of Us" is used.
In Pop Culture
In an episode of Drawn Together, a character's mentally-handicapped cousin, voiced by Sarah Silverman, can only communicate by quoting reviews from I Am Sam.
In the film Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Stiller's actor characters have a conversation about how actors should never go too far when performing a mentally challenged character.