“Green and Gold” is an homage to the “trouble on the farm” movies — “The River,” “Country,” “Places in the Heart” — that were a both a staple of the Reagan/Bush years, and largely a product of Reagan/Bush policies.

This one comes with a side order of football.

It’s a lightly immersive look at dairy farm life and the stresses that fell on family farms during that dozen years, but the film is somewhat over-ambitious as it lurches from crisis to crisis and Big Life Decision during the NFL fall and winter of ’93, when future welfare queen Brett Favre was gunslinging the Packers to an unlikely title run.

Craig T. Nelson stars as Buck, a Wisconsin small town farmer who still does some things the old fashioned way. He’s a caretaker of the land and how it’s used and protected. He’d love to pass the dairy farm on to granddaughter Jenny (Madison Lawlor of TV’s “Casa Grande”). But she’s “a lot like her (dead) mother,” a free spirit more into music and her musical muse, Joni Mitchell.

It’s why Jenny takes a potshot at the farm’s security (street) light every AM, “ruining the day” for one and all.

But overdue bank loans and the ever falling price of milk also hang over Buck and wife Margaret’s (Annabel Armour) dream of making this a fourth generation farm. Buck’s been “dealt the orange sticker of death,” one old timer’s (M. Emmett Walsh, in his final film) nickname for the foreclosure notice.

The second generation banker (Tim Frank) is more sentimental over his classic Camaro SS than he is over farmers who mortgaged and mortgaged themselves and couldn’t afford that last herd of Holsteins they bought.

Luckily, Buck and everybody else up there amongst the dairy farms and dells has a handy distraction. The Packers are stumbling their way through a long playoff drought. Buck has about as much chance of turning things around as the Pack, banker Jerry jokes. But “I’ll tell you what,” if they get to the Super Bowl, he’ll grant Buck a year’s grace to get back in the black.

Jenny can’t commit to this, because she’s just started gigging in” Brew Town.” And there’s this singer-songwriter (Brandon Sklenar of “It Ends with Us” and “Emily the Criminal”) who’s taken up residence at a nearby fishing cabin. Maybe if she bats her eyes he’ll give a listen to her forlorn prairie folk pop.

First-time feature director Anders Lindwal can’t keep this narrative from lurching back and forth even as he sets a fine, overcast and somewhat funereal tone for the proceedings. Scene after scene has Jenny (usually) sprinting into the frame to plead that something’s wrong with a heiffer giving birth/a neighbor who locked himself in a shed with a shotgun/somebody fell/somebody’s on the farm “taking pictures” for possible Big Ag buyers of “We do things the right way” small farms like Buck’s.

It wouldn’t be a “trouble on the farm” movie if somebody didn’t drive a tractor into town in protest.

There’s a tug of war over Jenny’s heart, the shy farmhand (Ashton Moio) who figures he has no shot with her after she meets the handsome singer/songwriter. Talk of “the artiste” going “going away to college” which grandpa dismisses with a “Redneck Tech” was good enough for him is just an excuse to ignore the movie’s possible resolutions to the dilemmas presented.

When everybody’s broke because of the same milk prices and other pressures as Buck, how are they supposed to help? Ideas and plot threads are whacked off just as arbitrarily as they are introduced.

Jenny’s music — Natalie Nicoles does the actual singing — is Lilith Fair pretty. Finding reasons it can’t be a “solution” takes some serious contortions of logic and common sense.

And the plot introduces a lot more issues and conflicts than it can neatly resolve with its fantasy finale.

The earnestness of this enterprise will be enough for some. But the script rubs all the edges off the real world conditions of that place at that time — I lived there then — rather like the way conservative virtue signaller Craig T. Nelson bitches about “government handouts” when he has admitted he took plenty. Not as many as Brett Favre, but still.

“Green and Gold” may have its heart in the right place, but that irregular heartbeat is something that should have been rewritten out of it.

Rating: unrated, PG worthy

Cast: Madison Lawlor, Craig T. Nelson, Annabel Armour, Tim Frank, Ashton Moio, M. Emmett Walsh and Brandon Sklenar

Credits: Directed by Anders Lindwal, scripted by Missi Mareau Garcia, Steven Shafer and Anders Lindwal. A Fathom Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:45