SO OFTEN A buoyant, physically exuberant actor, Kevin Bacon withdraws and shrinks to fit the skin of Walter, the protagonist in director-coscenarist Nicole Kassell's first feature, adapted from a play by Stephen Fechter. Walter has just been released after 12 years in prison and returns to his native Philadelphia. But there's no family or community left that's willing to embrace him. Even life among strangers bristles with the threat of rejection, or worse – since Walter is now a registered child molester, taking up residence in a bad-side-of-town apartment because, he says, it had "the only landlord in town who would take my money." At least his offenses remain unknown – for a while – to his coworkers at the lumberyard where he's reluctantly rehired by the son (David Alan Grier) of his loyal former employer. Walter figures he'll just keep his distance, avoiding trouble by being as nonpresent as possible. But his concern for tough lone female forklift driver Vicki (Kyra Sedgwick) – another misfit who's the object of endless "Hey, baby" horseplay – piques her interest, in a favorable way he's barely equipped to welcome. More negatively, he also stirs the curiosity of clerical busybody Mary-Kay (rapper-sitcom star Eve), who takes offense at his standoffishness and proves a formidable vicious-gossip nemesis. Meanwhile, Walter also has to cope with a sister who refuses to reconcile, a brother-in-law (the excellent Benjamin Bratt) playing intermediary, and a neighborhood cop (Mos Def) whose hectoring attentiveness borders on harassment. But mostly, our hero is fraught with battling his old demons. The Woodsman has its share of contrived elements – it is perhaps too convenient that Walter's new digs overlook an elementary school playground. And why doesn't he protect himself by reporting the possible pederast he spies outside? Still, the credibly glum lower-class Philly milieu, Bacon's half-dead eyed conviction, and a couple of complexly harrowing man-child scenes make this bizarre Christmas Day release powerful in its quietude. Without pushing, it suggests that in the paranoid child-endangerment climate of recent years, even nonviolent offenders of this type face almost impossible odds in terms of reforming and acclimatizing to mainstream society and not reverting to their past ways. (Dennis Harvey)