Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tender Bar’ on Amazon Prime, a Terrific Ben Affleck Performance Trapped in a Coming-of-Age Dud

Amazon Prime’s The Tender Bar is a coming-of-age drama-slash-comedy notable for the names attached to it: One, director George Clooney, whose career behind the camera has muddled and skidded through The Monuments Men, The Midnight Sky and Suburbicon in recent years. Another is Ben Affleck, who’s aging like fine wine as an actor, showing an ability to disappear into his recent roles, e.g., The Way Back and The Last Duel, like never before. Third is J.R. Moehringer, the Pulitzer-winning journalist whose memoir is the basis of the film. And maybe fourth is Daniel Ranieri, the young actor who shows considerable screen presence in his acting debut. The movie has some awards potential, so maybe it’s something worth getting excited about?

THE TENDER BAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Young J.R. (Ranieri) and his mother (Lily Rabe) zoom down the road with “Radar Love” blaring from the radio of their Ford Fairlane. The trunk is tied down over piles of luggage. A mattress flaps on the roof. The DJ delivers his bumper and Mom angrily shuts off the radio. That was J.R.’s dad on the air; he makes a piece of shit look like 1,000 tulips. It’s 1973, and Mom and J.R. are moving back in with her dad in his Long Island crazyhouse, a dilapidated/well-loved place with a revolving door on aunts and uncles and cousins and children and grandchildren, depending on who you are and how old you are in this family.

Narrating this is J.R. from now or maybe 2005 when the book was published, it probably doesn’t matter. The most significant voices in his story come from Mom and maybe his overly flatulent Grandpa (Christopher Lloyd), but definitely his Uncle Charlie, because he actually has a name and is played by Ben Affleck, gunning for a best supporting actor nod. The men are important because J.R.’s dad – referred to here only as The Voice, and yes you may chafe at that – is a non-entity. Charlie takes it upon himself to teach the boy some Man Shit (“never under any circumstances hit a woman, even if she stabs you with scissors”) as he stands behind the bar at local watering hole The Dickens, named after Charles, the great writer, serving up drinks to the regulars and sliding root beers all the way down to J.R. on the end.

Young J.R. thinks he wants to be a writer, and makes his own newspaper, The Family Gazette; his crappo dad occasionally barely shows up; Uncle Charlie gives him all kinds of books to read and sometimes takes him bowling with his mostly harmless barfly pals. His mom wants him to go to Yale and be a lawyer, and once that’s mentioned, the movie starts jumping to Late Teens/Early Twenties J.R. (Tye Sheridan), slowly spending more and more time with him there in the early ’80s. He applies to Yale; he gets into Yale; he brings his roomies to The Dickens; he falls in love with a lovely young woman named Sidney (Briana Middleton), although that’s a disaster, because isn’t it always? There is so much age comma coming of comma going on here, and you just can’t deny all the poignancy it’s soaked in.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sorry, but Lady Bird, The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Eighth Grade absolutely trounce this tepid movie in the coming-of-age department.

Performance Worth Watching: Although Sheridan is pretty good here, Affleck’s performance is the only one worth mentioning among all the underwritten roles. He truly is coming into his own, and without him, The Tender Bar would dry up and blow away.

Memorable Dialogue: “Publishing is heading towards memoir” is a mantra repeated by many characters here in the screenplay’s moments of grating self-awareness.

Sex and Skin: A lovemaking scene that demands that word because it’s set in the ’80s.

Our Take: This is nothing to get excited about. Clooney has a firm grip on the grit and texture of 1970s Long Island (which looks believably exactly the same in the 1980s), from the gigantic cars to the equally gigantic sideburns, and the nostalgia bath is warm and bubbly. But beyond that, The Tender Bar is content to skim for minnows when it should be dangling for a fat marlin. The primary thematic thread here is the male influence in J.R.’s life – how Cool Uncle Charlie shows great affection for his nephew in his own distinctive way, but can’t make up for the reprehensible emotional truancy of The Voice (gack), who haunts the boy from the airwaves. Curiously, the screenplay doesn’t give this material the time and weight it requires, curiously straying from the vitality of Affleck’s presence to pursue the usual tropes: Heartbreak, career angst, graduation, all the cliches of the genre, presented with a fleeting air of cleverness and not much in the way of comedy or substance.

J.R.’s family offers a bizarre dynamic that begs further exploration – why Grandpa is a mostly eccentric old coot who’s accused of being emotionally stingy, yet keeps his door open so his children can blame him for their need to move back in when they fail. It makes some vague inferences about social class, takes a passing nod at religion, almost acknowledges the existence of alcoholism, all potentially rich, colorful fodder that nobody here seems interested in. It’s a weirdly unfocused story with some cloying I-wanted-to-be-a-writer-and-hey-look-at-me-now non-nutritional narrative frosting smeared on the top, the type of movie that should be easy to love, but is ultimately an underwhelming disappointment.

Our Call: SKIP IT. It’s tempting to recommend The Tender Bar on the basis of Affleck’s performance, but beyond that, it’s a dud.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.