“Rez Ball” is a feel-good sports dramedy tailor-made for teens and tweens.

It may be groaningly predictable in its adherence to formula, as most any adult sports film/basketball drama viewer knows what’s coming and when, and can even be bark out lines of dialogue before characters state the too-obvious. The ending is anti-climactic, and an excuse to pad on anti-climaxes after the anti-climax.

But this Sydney Freeland (“Drunktown’s Finest”) feature, based on a Michael Powell novel, is a sports drama that at least touches on some of the most widely known problems of Indian reservations — grinding poverty, pervasive alcoholism and a suicide-rate outstripping the rest of the population.

Its likeable, relateable characters may be sketched-in and never really understood at their own level. But decent performances parked in a striking setting — a Navajo Reservation in rural New Mexico — make it a genial, entertaining Native American run through the “Hoosiers,” “Coach Carter” and “Glory Road” playbook.

Two Chuska High School pals have big plans for their senior season on the Warriors basketball team. Nataanii (Kusem Goodwin) is the bigger star, but high-scoring Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) isn’t exactly in his shadow.

They go together “like diabetes and frybread,” and are so good they can showboat through the ending of their season opener, irking their ex-WNBA star coach (Jessica Matten).

But the uncomfortable post-game interviews, radio coverage and a simple roadside memorial hint at what weighs on Nataanii’s mind. He lost his mother and sister in an off-season drunk driving accident. Jimmy’s back-home issues begin and end with his unemployed alcoholic mother (Julia Jones), who expects him to be a bread-winner as well as a possible college basketball recruit.

Their teammates may be a happy-go-lucky collection of “types” — one’s named Warlance, Bryson already has a “baby mama” — barely more than sketched-in as characters. But there’s enough in this lineup to challenge for a state title.

Then the worst happens, and Nataanii won’t be there for them to lean on. As the team struggles on the court (“grief” is a bit shortchanged), tempers flare and there’s nothing for it but to go beyond their normal “Rez Ball” style — “Run fast, shoot fast, don’t ever stop.”

They’ll need “The Old Ways,” a sagebrush smudging from their “new” assistant coach, Benny (Ernest Tsosie III), who ran the girls’ team when Coach Heather was a player there. They might benefit from a little teamwork training on a tiny sheep ranch out on the rez.

And they’ll need screenwriting magic to survive a string of cliffhangers and an avalanche of second chances.

The movie gets the job done, but I have to say does it rather clumsily. A big deal is made out of that “Hoosiers” assistant coach addition, but little is done with the character. Alcoholism is addressed, with nothing said about the teen drinking that goes on.

The picture’s early scenes hint at some splashy play, and racist on-court trash talk from their bitter white Catholic school rivals in Sante Fe — “You look like the guy that mows my yard. You guys related?” The trash talk turns funny when the depleted and downhearted boys’ team gets schooled and taunted by their own girls’ team in a scrimmage.

“Ever heard of DEODORANT?”

But the energy flags as the movie devotes most of its screen time to games. The novelties of this milieu — hearing “The Star Spangled Banner” in Navajo, players who don’t know their native language learning it so that they can “code talk” plays on the court — aren’t enough to overcome the script’s many trite shortcomings.

Yes, there are (occasionally) funny play-by-play/color announcers (Dallas Goldtooth and Cody Lightning) who cover the games and joke about “cultural appropriation” and “frybread.”

The cast is uneven, but game, with young Bratt (nephew of Benjamin Bratt) standing out, and Jones and Goodwind and Devin Sampson-Craig, as the hotheaded baby daddy point guard, make impressions.

But aside from a couple of genuinely touching moments, “Rez Ball” is dramatically flat. Heartache and heartbreak are suggested but never plumbed or embraced.

The whole ends up being is somewhat less than the sum of its players, characters and the unusual setting, a “Hoosiers” that fails to find the necessary heart to come off.

Rating: PG-13, suicide, fisticuffs, alcoholism, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Kauchani Bratt, Jessica Matten, Devin Sampson-Craig, Julia Jones, Ernest Tsosie III and Kusem Goodwind.

Credits: Directed by Sydney Freeland, scripted by Sydney Freeland and Sterlin Harjo, based on a novel by Michael Powell. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51