The Tender Bar

 

George Clooney's The Tender Bar takes a familiar coming-of-age story (based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer) and turns it into a rumination on the people and events that give our lives structure by their presence and their absence.

Tye Sheridan plays J.R., a young man who has grown up on Long Island under the watchful eye of his mother (Lily Rabe) and with the loving tutelage of her brother, his Uncle Charlie, played with wonderful ease and enormous charm by Ben Affleck (in top acting form). They are all living with J.R.'s grandparents (Christopher Lloyd and Sondra James) in a clapboard house that's barely large enough to hold them and the various aunts and cousins who use it as a port during life's frequent storms. They're a loving, unkempt, directionless mess.

Uncle Charlie owns a bar, The Dickens, and is as schooled in the ways of the world (and man science) as anyone, due primarily to his voracious appetite for great books. He pushes young J.R. (played as a boy by the impressive child actor Daniel Ranieri) to read, which inspires the chronically indecisive boy to set his sights on being a writer.

J.R. gets a scholarship to Yale, falls badly in love, establishes a lifelong friendship but carries around the weight of his absent father (Max Martini), a radio D.J. who abandoned the family shortly after J.R.'s birth and only appears or calls to assure and disappoint. This is something J.R. must be rid of before he can move on.

Clooney is adept at bringing his players into close proximity, in spaces where they exchange intimacies, soft lies and hard truths. Every barstool wise-crack, callow insensitivity or naive reveal feels real. And that's the picture's true strength, despite some unevenness in character development and narrative flow, it feels really authentic.