There’s a yellow tinge to the photography in George Clooney’s latest directorial outing that makes every shot look like a vintage postcard from the 1970s. And it’s fair to say that this amiable but almost farcically uneventful adaptation of the 2005 memoir by JR Moehringer is also postcard-thin in its plotting and insight.
Tye Sheridan plays JR as an aspiring young writer; Daniel Ranieri plays his younger self, a precocious tyke who finds a father figure in his affable Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck). The young JR hangs around the blue-collar Long Island bar that Charlie runs, charming the grizzled patrons and bumming drinks in return for the answers to newspaper word puzzles. His mother has high hopes for him; she also has cancer, which just sort of goes away halfway through the film. But even with the leverage of serious disease, it’s hard to get particularly invested in JR’s journey from a loving but eccentric working-class background to success at Yale.
