There’s no heavy lifting in “Goodrich,” the Michael Keaton/Mila Kunis dramedy about a workaholic second-time-around dad forced to reconnect with his kids, including the one old enough to be pregnant.

The jokes about trying, after 60, to learn to be a dad, are easy to reach to the point of cute and mostly low-hanging fruit. The formula in play is another “I did my best” parent facing a sometimes comic, sometimes sad reckoning.

At its most somber, it reaches for “Kramer vs. Kramer.” In lighter moments, one can wonder if all involved could have just turned this into a sequel to one of Keaton’s earliest hits, “Mister Mom.” The edgiest thing about it is its rating, “R,” for profanity. It would have reached a wider audience as a PG-13.

But this it’s well-acted and it plays. More or less.

Writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer was an actress before getting that first writing-directing (Reese Witherspoon’s “Home Again”), but is still most famously the daughter of writer-director couple Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, who remade “The Parent Trap” and “Father of the Bride” before divorcing. She doesn’t embarrass herself and give Hollywood “nepo babies” a bad name here any more than she makes her name with this slight, derivative star vehicle.

Keaton has the title role playing the embattled owner of a tony, boutique art gallery struggling to stay afloat by surfing the ever-changing tastes of Left Coast art lovers, the ups and downs of “the market” and the mercurial moods of artists he needs to please.

Goodrich Gallery may be going under (Kevin Pollack plays the not-so-silent “business” partner) if he can’t land The Next Big Thing. But that’s not what wakes owner Andy up in the middle of the night. His wife is calling. From rehab. She’s checked herself in to shake her pill addiction.

“The woman that I live with doesn’t have a drug abuse problem!”

He’s the last to know, she tells him, because “We live totally separate lives.” And by the way, she’s leaving him.

Sixty-something Andy might be on his own with those two late-life nine-year-old twins, Billie and Mose (Vivian Lyra Blair, Jacob Kopera). He can only lie to them about where Mom went for so long. Maybe his 36 year old daughter (Kunis) can pitch in, as he’s “got a thing” pretty much every night, wining and dining artists and buyers.

The movie is about Andy’s belated transition to attentive father, and his oldest daughter’s resentment that this transition didn’t happen thirty years sooner.

The jokes are of the Dad-doesn’t-know-which-grade-his-kids-are-in variety. That drone Mose is playing with in their expensively-decorated house in the Hollywood hills?

“Who GOT you that thing?” “You and Mom got it for us last Christmas!”

The father/oldest-daughter banter may not be original, but Keaton and Kunis make it work.

“This is me begging you. How often do I do this?”

“Do you want me to answer that?”

“LATELY. I was going to say ‘lately.'”

The script doesn’t do a great job of zeroing in on that relationship, as it drifts off into gallery concerns, with the daughter (Carmen Ejogo) of a just-died famous artist to charm and a divorced gay dad (Michael Urie) of a sickly child at their kids’ school to, um, bond with.

Honestly, the picture teeters on the edge of “hackneyed” more than once, although at least some of that is recognizing comic crutches and “types” we’ve seen in plenty of screenplays by our writer-director’s Mom Nancy Meyers and to a lesser degree Dad, Charles Shyer. That new gay friend, his no-nonsense Israeli babysitter? Vintage Nancy and Charles. Did they offer their daughter tips?

But Keaton still has the timing, and aiming for “sweet” as his career veers towards repeating himself (“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice”), TV, B-thrillers (“Knox Goes Away”) and lesser superhero fare wasn’t a bad choice. Kunis gives her pregnant, resentful daughter some edge.

And Ejogo and Andie MacDowell (as Goodrich’s artist “first wife”) make decent impressions.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

Rating: R, for profanity

Cast: Michael Keaton, Mila Kunis, Carmen Ejogo, Kevin Pollack and Andie MacDowell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer. A Ketchup Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:50