Review: The Tender Bar Bangs a Ham-Handed Drum for an Uneventful Life

Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer’s memoir, George Clooney’s The Tender Bar is a coming-of-age story that feels as if it was conceived inside of a lab. The film follows J.R. from his days as a young boy (Daniel Ranieri), when he and his financially strapped mother, Dorothy (Lily Rabe), moved from the city back to her family’s home in Manhasset, Long Island, to his time as an adolescent (Tye Sheridan), when he entered college and prepared for the adult world. As far as personal histories go, it’s a familiar one, right down to the father’s abandonment, which is the closest thing that we get to a motivating factor in J.R.’s life, and which the film can’t quite decide is compelling, contrived, or both.

Early on, William Monahan’s screenplay makes a point of reminding us of Dorothy’s financial difficulties but remains largely uninterested in the particulars of that hardship. That’s because the film is mostly preoccupied with the emotional tribulations caused by the absence of J.R.’s father and how that, above all else, inspired him to become a writer. The way the film tells it, J.R. spent much of his youth listening to his father, a disc jockey known as Johnny Michaels (Max Martini), on the radio and imagining the kind of relationship that they could have had.

J.R. was the product of a fling that Johnny had with Dorothy. When the man reappears in his kid’s orbit, he speaks about Dorothy in brutally misogynistic terms and even casually neglects his son during the rare custody visit. Johnny exits The Tender Bar just as quickly as he enters it, yet his overwhelming toxicity leaves a sufficient stain to back the film’s thesis that the boy’s life was forever shaped by his traumatic separation from such an asshole of a human being. By the same token, J.R.’s familial support system is such that it compensates for Johnny’s negative impact on the kid’s being. Rarely does it feel as if J.R. wants for affection or attention.

With relaxed but sentimental conviction, The Tender Bar reflects on an ostensibly foundational aspect of J.R.’s life, only to undercut or overwhelm conventional expectations of its depiction. When J.R. heads off to Yale, he falls in love with a girl (Briana Middleton) who sees him as just a friend. The experience is obviously painful for J.R., but the way the film torturously fixates on the kid’s emotional agony, framing it as the defining moment of his college career, you’d think that he was humanity’s only victim of unrequited love.

Throughout, The Tender Bar moves from beat to beat with no interest in sitting in any moment to consider how J.R. might be changed by a particular experience, such as him receiving a few assignments at the New York Times but failing to get a staff position for the reasonable assertion that he lacks experience. And through it all, Sheridan’s default mode is a blank passivity that’s out of sync with the emotional temperature of a scene.

Many coming-of-age movies have made a virtue of recognizing that most lives are commonplace, even humdrum. By contrast, The Tender Bar treats easily surmounted setbacks with an urgency that’s dissonant. This is exemplified by the camera occasionally darting ahead of the sedentary drama and snap-zooming on a small observation that illuminates nothing other than a stray detail that catches a character’s eye. The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.

The lone bright spot of The Tender Bar is Ben Affleck as Charlie, J.R.’s no-nonsense, street-smart bartender uncle and de facto father. The actor effortlessly conveys both the solid, affectionate presence that would mesmerize a child of divorce as well as the limits of the man’s seemingly infinite wisdom. Charlie possesses the sort of history that you only gain if you’ve spent most of your life around barflies, offering advice that’s most centered on making sure that J.R. never becomes the sort of person that a bartender would describe as a “regular.” In his mix of performative gregariousness and quiet resolve to push his nephew into a better class of existence, Charlie wears a life of small pleasures and intimate defeats on his sleeve, and Affleck’s performance is so gracefully calibrated that viewers may find themselves wishing that Charlie’s spirt had rubbed off on The Tender Bar as a whole.