The Tender Bar: George Clooney Coming-of-Age Drama the Embodiment of Meh

By Kim Hughes

Rating: C

Having a powerhouse like George Clooney direct a startlingly by-the-numbers story like The Tender Bar is a bit like having famed British architect Norman Foster design a doghouse: interesting in theory maybe, but probably not the best use of his time and talents.

The film, based on the 2005 memoir by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist J. R. Moehringer, is textbook coming-of-age with all the caricatures the genre demands. Despite Clooney’s guiding hand and committed performances from a good cast, the film doesn’t once rise above movie-of-the-week level. Material this predictable won’t permit it.

As things begin, young and extravagantly eyelashed J.R. (Daniel Ranieri, three cheers) and his feisty mom Dorothy (Lily Rabe) return to the extended family home in Long Island, escaping J.R.’s dirtbag radio DJ dad (Max Martini).

Therein resides grouchy, distant grandpa (Christopher Lloyd) and caring uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck), who bartends at the saloon of the title and becomes a father figure to J.R. along with a handful of benevolent regulars considerably less developed than the cast of Cheers. Or Barfly.

J.R. — a play on “junior” as the lad wants to put distance between himself and the old man, a running gag in the film — likes to read and soon finds himself eagerly perched over a typewriter, where he begins spinning the stories that will eventually lead to his grown-up life. Uncle Charlie is forever cheerleading from the wings.

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Dorothy’s fondest hope is for J.R. to attend Yale, thus escaping the working-class status of the family. Of course, he does eventually (Tye Sheridan plays the young adult J.R.), where he meets, falls in love with, and eventually loses fellow student Sidney (Briana Middleton). Then writes his memoir, which also becomes a running gag in the film, that the age of the novel is giving way to the memoir. The end.

Sure, some other stuff happens in between. But I promise you have seen some version of the same before rendered far more appealingly: J.R. and his dad reunite, sort of, before J.R. realizes what a true scumbag his dad is, just as his mother and uncle Charlie told him; J.R. bonds with suddenly not-so-grouchy grandpa at a father/son breakfast where grandpa gently fills in for absentee dad; J.R. lands a gig at the New York Times; he forms deep friendships with his roommates at Yale.

The Tender Bar has no climax to speak of, no huge drama, no surprises or sudden deaths or moments of reckoning or revelation. Even J.R.’s eventual split with Sidney carries all the emotional heft of an unreturned phone call.

It’s not clear what Clooney’s hope for his film was, but presumably it was grander than what lands on the screen.

The Tender Bar. Directed by George Clooney. Written by William Monahan based on the memoir by J. R. Moehringer. Starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, Christopher Lloyd, and Max Martini. In select theatres December 17, and on Amazon Prime Video January 7.