Remember when George Clooney made quality movies? Though the actor-turned-director’s 2020 feature, The Midnight Sky, showed he could handle sci-fi reasonably well, The Tender Bar flirts with being his worst film yet, ultimately ceding the title to reigning champ, Suburbicon.

Based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer, the story of mysteriously redubbed JR Maguire (played at varying ages by Daniel Ranieri and Tye Sheridan) growing up in a hardscrabble yet highly supportive multigenerational household on Long Island plays like an uninspired hodgepodge of Good Will Hunting and Uncle Frank.

From Yale aspirations put on JR by his hard-luck mother (Lily Rabe, American Horror Story) to intellectual musings with his bartender Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck) to his baffling trust in his deadbeat absentee alcoholic father (Max Martini, Pacific Rim), The Tender Bar cribs from better fact-based tales, relaying an unremarkable collection of experiences that don’t warrant autobiography status — and certainly not cinematic depiction.

Under Clooney’s workmanlike direction, Affleck is serviceable as the resident sage (who inexplicably still lives at home) and Christopher Lloyd spices things up in his handful of scenes as the Maguire patriarch, but Sheridan proves a bland leading man, incapable of elevating the lousy script from William Monahan (The Departed). Tired lessons about overcoming obstacles and not repeating others’ mistakes sit beside ham-fisted critiques of the pseudo-wealthy — Shocker alert: they can be snooty — but it’s the film’s condescending attitude toward journalism that’s most problematic. 

Upon being advised to *gasp* get more experience before being hired as a full-time New York Times reporter, JR smugly ditches the profession, freeing him up to pursue the apparently far nobler career of writing fiction. Whether rooted in Moehringer’s memoir or a Monahan invention, the dismissal is an odd, insulting stance to take and adds to The Tender Bar’s long list of missteps.

Grade: C-minus. Rated R. Available to stream via Amazon Prime Video

(Photo: Claire Folger)