George Clooney’s directorial career has been in such a reliably steady nosedive – falling from the early heights of Good Night, and Good Luck to the gutter of Suburbicon, he’s a rare director who gets worse with each passing project – that his latest feature, The Tender Bar, may feel like more of an accomplishment than it is. That it’s at least watchable is an improvement; that it is even occasionally enjoyable feels like a miracle. His worst instincts occasionally kick in, but generally speaking, it’s a pleasant enough diversion.

The script by William Monahan (who adapted The Departed) is based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer. The coming-of-age story, set on Long Island, begins in 1973, as J.R. (played at this age by Daniel Ranieri, and by Tye Sheridan is a young man) and his mother (Lily Rabe) return to the ramshackle family home where she was raised. Grandpa (Christopher Lloyd) isn’t exactly a cheerful presence, but it’s the kind of family where the adult children are in a constant state of regrouping, emotionally and financially.

Uncle Charlie doesn’t ever seem to leave at all. Played by Ben Affleck, who sports a spectacular pair of sideburns and his reliably knowing smirk, Charlie is a charmer, a good-time guy who tends bar at neighborhood watering hole (and yes, I’m afraid the title is an inversion of “bartender”); his vocation and demeanor hide his intellectual prowess and curiosity. He’s full of literary references and little bits of wisdom, and since J.R.’s father is a piece of shit radio disc jockey who abandoned his family before the kid was even born, Uncle Charlie takes it upon himself to teach J.R. “the male sciences.”

We spend a fair amount of time in this ‘70s frame before jumping ahead, roughly a decade, to J.R.’s entry into adulthood – specifically to Yale, which is a thrill to his mother, who’s dreamed endlessly of her boy heading off to an Ivy League school. Sheridan is good in this section (better than he’s been in a while), bundling up the kid’s tics and insecurities, and his chemistry with charming Brianna Middleton is so good that the movie falls right in with them, right away. But the relationship is over so quickly, and subsequently handled so clumsily, that it hardly seems worth the trouble; something turns her away from him early on, and the film never bothers to explain what.

It’s frankly strange to choose ambiguity on that point, and absolutely nowhere else. George Clooney distrusts his audience in a way that only someone who watched Out of Sight tank could, so his direction is competent (inspired in spots, even), but his recent films are infected by a sense that he’s worried we’re not getting the point, and he must make sure that we do. Around the midpoint, there’s a scene involving the opening and reading of the Yale admissions later that Affleck plays to perfection – direct and moving, but not overdoing it. And then Clooney slathers the scene in goopy, twinkly score, and ruins it.

The running narration, needless to say, causes even more trouble. Ron Livingston pipes into scene after scene, reading what sounds like an audiobook of the memoir, which is the only explanation for its hammer-to-the-head quality; describing Grandpa’s house as “a full compliment of laughter and tears” is on the nose even by the standards of expositional narration. Later, Uncle Charlie goes to a meeting with J.R.’s school psychologist and ends up shredding the guy, which makes for a good scene – until the next one, when the narrator informs us, “Uncle Charlie didn’t go to college. He was self-taught. But that didn’t mean some dime-store shrink could go toe to toe.” Yes, we just saw the scene. We understood it.

The easy-listening ‘70s pop needle occasionally fall into the same realm, but cause less damage; the vibe of those records is so specific that they’re kinda necessary, and they get the job done. (There’s a lot conveyed by “Dancin’ in the Moonlight” that you just don’t get in any other song). And Monahan’s script has some little gems in it, occasional moments of knowing dialogue – there are multitude contained in a line like “I’m lettin’ myself have a cocktail from time to time” – and thankfully, when we get to J.R.’s inevitable, wildly uncomfortable reunion with his deadbeat dad, Clooney lets us sit in the thick, terrible silence.

But the deeper it goes, the less Affleck we get, and that’s to the movie’s detriment. His scenes are the best in the movie; the chummy vibe of that bar is palpable, and those scenes put across an established cast of characters, and a sense of their relationships, shorthand, and slang. He forms a credible relationship with J.R. (both of them), and the grace notes he hits and holds in their last scene together are a wonder to behold – so good, in fact, that the film ends feeling stronger than it is. The Tender Bar is a nice, warm movie – flawed, sure, but hard to dislike with any particular vigor.