This adaptation of JR Moehringer’s memoirs, directed by Clooney, is strikingly empty of plausible emotion
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George Clooney has long been a force for good in movies and public life – but what a bafflingly bland, indulgent, gritless oyster of a film he’s directed here. It is a boy’s own coming-of-age story without any believable growing pains, or pains of any sort, and is based on the bestselling memoir by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist JR Moehringer – which has had a whole lot of famous men asking him to ghostwrite their autobiographies, including our own
Prince Harry.
The Tender Bar is about a kid growing up poor on Long Island with a mostly absent, abusive dad, a toughly determined mom, and getting a rough-and-ready literary education hanging out in the local bar run by his book-mad uncle, and finally getting a scholarship to Yale in the Class of 86.
Ben Affleck plays the boozy bibliophile Uncle Charlie in whose pub, the Dickens, he nurses a literary spark in JR, played as a little boy by newcomer Daniel Ranieri and as a grownup by Tye Sheridan. Lily Rabe does a decent
Job as JR’s hardworking mom who has to bring her son back to her childhood home when her husband runs out on them; Christopher Lloyd is the cranky, ornery old grandpa in whose house all these deadbeats have ended up, and Max Martini is plausibly threatening as JR’s errant dad, a disc jockey called “The Voice” whose gravelly tones the boy yearningly listens out for on the radio.