There’s no reinventing the wheel when it comes to movies about addiction. We’re all familiar with the “steps” in screenplays that mimic “stages of grief” more than AA’s famous “twelve steps.”

Loved ones are tested and abused, impulses are indulged, weaknesses are exposed, pitied and loathed. Relapses, self-destructive lashing out, a stop for a “meeting,” resistance and either surrender “to a higher power” or to getting help or simply giving in to that addiction that is going to kill you, these are the tropes of movies about the subject, and “Bleeding Love” can’t avoid them.

But this story of a long-estranged father taking the 20 year-old he barely knows any more from San Diego to Sante Fe is wrapped in a poignance that isn’t hard to embrace. Whatever familiar situations we see a father (Ewan McGregor) experience with his trainwreck daughter (Clara McGregor) resonate in ways that overwhelm any urge to give this lightweight drama a “trite” dismissal.

We can attribute that to the redemptive and sometimes painfully helpless feeling of such stories. But actors and “baggage” play their part here, as well. Yes, Clara McGregor is a pretty “nepo baby.” I’d say what we recall about what dad Ewan put their family through trumps that, in this case, and gives this familiar story a forgiving tone that lifts it above that over-familiarity.

We meet them in dad’s battered ’80s Chevy Sierra pickup, the one with a “Highlands” landscaping logo on the side. He’s in his 40s, still with a hint of a Scots accent, and he’s driving his damaged 20 year-old daughter to rehab.

All his “You know I’ve been there” sympathy and “I was acting like a child, but I HAD a child” excuses fall on deaf ears. The daughter is dismissive, sneaky, quick to steal a drink from a fellow diner’s glass, shoplift bottles from a convenience store and make any rash decision that will get her that next buzz.

Even “You have no idea how lucky you are to be alive” doesn’t move her. Because she is. She OD’d the day before. He got the call from his ex. And since many of her earliest childhood memories are of her ever-entertaining father, blitzed and driving, tripping at a ball game or just “fun” in ways that suggest chemical assistance, he figures it’s time he took on this “make amends” step in his own life.

Screenwriter Ruby Caster turned this “reunion on the way to rehab” tale into a road picture, and director Emma Westenberg (“Stranger’s Arms”) keeps the collection of odd, funny, revealing and just plain random encounters short, biting and occasionaly sweet as we lumber down that long and well-worn highway.

A breakdown? Sure? Wildly eccentric tow-truck driver (Kim Zimmer)? OK. An impromptu birthday-party/truck-repair session, coming on to the drugs and booze-proving host of the party (Jake Weary), taking a forbidden after hours dip at a dumpy motel pool and indulging a death-by-chocolate-and-whipped-cream pancake breakfast the way the daughter liked them as a child are among the waypoints.

Will a lifetime of big and bigger mistakes set up the Biggest Mistake of All? Maybe. But not until after the father-daughter sing-along to the film’s title tune, “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis.

“I keep bleeding, keep keep bleeding love…”

Nothing here comes as much of a surprise, even the most “random” encounter of them all. Dad is a much more accomplished, subtle and expressive actor than his daughter, and the experience gap shows, here and there.

But the right emotional buttons are punched, enough of them at just the right moment for “Bleeding Love” to not bleed out. It plays like 12 step cinematic comfort food, and if you’re drawn to it and find yourself enjoying it, no “making amends” is necessary.

Rating: unrated, drug addiction, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ewan McGregor and Clara McGregor, Kim Zimmer and Jake Weary

Credits: Directed by Emma Westenberg, scripted by Ruby Caster. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41