So a 50ish alcoholic manic depressive comic moves to Key West to run a comedy club.

Sounds like a movie, right? Well, it did to Joe List. And as he’s one of the hot comics of his generation, he got a film crew together and went to cruise ship era Key West for a weekend — not terribly long before Key West troubador Jimmy Buffett died —  a sort of bacchanale/interview and let’s-do-some-sets-together with his career-long friend Tom Dustin.

“Tom Dustin: Portrait of a Comedian” sets up as another version of Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary “Comedian,” a depiction of the life, the ups and downs of the work, as seen via one guy who “made it” and one who never will.

Generously taken, it’s a filmed effort by List to immortalize a colleague who, as Dustin himself notes, will be “forgotten” without a Netflix, HBO or whoever stand-up special to capture his persona and his act on film. More generously, it could be that List figures his talks-about-his-issues-on-camera friend is not long for this world.

Aged, touristy and booze-and-drugs-soaked Key West was built on benders, and from the looks of things, Dustin’s been on one the whole time he’s been there.

But that’s observed rather than hammered home in a shapeless documentary that is filled with anecdotes that List wants to call “stories” as he’d originally thought to title the film “Tom Dustin: Storyteller.”

Let. Me. Guess.

With a Key West friend and fellow comic noting that “Tom has about 80 stories, and he tells them ALL every day,” and so very many of List’s stories about Tom and Tom’s stories about himself involving drunken escapades that barely merit the “escapades” label — Dustin wetting himself , etc. — and almost all of them are punctuated with or prefaced by a desperate “I FELL off my chair” or “I almost DIED laughing,” List looked at this footage in the editing process and realized it wasn’t funny.

Non-comics use “I like to have DIED” lines to insist what they observed/went-through was hilarious because they don’t have the chops to make it amusing as a bit.

Mercifully 15 minutes shorter than its festival-run length, “Portrait of a Comedian” uses clips of podcast and radio station interviews and snippets of old sets to flesh out the early years of these two Boston lads’ meeting and staying pals as one started up the ladder of success and another took on a grinding gig of appearing at all of America’s Funnybones comedy clubs, barely making ends meet and drinking up his thin profits as he did.

We hear about Tom’s childhood — son of a hustling, huxter used car salesman dad — hear of his “Open Mike Night” success and why he gave up when he bombed on his second outing, only to come back to stand-up after 9-11.

The two comics reference the documentary “When Stand Up Stood Out,” a similarly shapeless 2003 all-star film that captured Boston’s place in the stand-up explosion of a previous era. But they’d have been much better served watching “Comedian,” with its more coherent STRUCTURE, and more intimate observations of the life, the work and its pitfalls.

The grind of the hours, the drugs and impersonal one night stands, it’s all self-destructive and that’s a striking contrast to the jocularity on stage. Stand up’s long been about the damaged-and- angry-about-it struggling to get by, to “make it” and finally get rich and “happy.”

Richard Lewis wasn’t the first or the last stand up to use performance as “therapy,” and that notion has become a “Curb Your Enthusiasm/Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” cliche.

But the proliferation of streaming services just moved stand-up specials from HBO to Netflix. It didn’t really add new big payday venues. Just Comedy Central. And “pilot deals” for sitcoms — the finish line for a previous generation of comics– have all but dried up.

“Comedy Central never rang me up,” Dustin shrugs. And podcasts are for Marc Maron and the already-famous. So here Dustin is, making his mark in a town where a lot of the foot traffic gets back on a ship and leaves by dusk, before comedy clubs open.

Dustin performs laugh-out-loud funny bits, starting a “story” on stage by telling you he’s not going to cross this or that line, but admitting he’s just crossed that line so he’ll just cross several others. But the interviews, filled with tipsy, inside-joke laughter, ring comically hollow. The anecdotes and riffing between the two pals aren’t all that.

Key West and all of its denizens look day-after-a-bender old here, and Dustin notes the whole place is like “a cruise ship that ran aground.” Bingo.

But he’s making a go of Comedy Key West, emceeing and performing, “bringing my (comedian) friends down” for shows, packing the house. Dustin figures he’s found his destiny and seems happy with it. Perhaps. And perhaps constant drinking helps.

A chance ride-by — Jimmy Buffett on a bike — earns a tasteless suggestion that they “keep” that in the movie and chase Key West’s most famous popularizer down “because he won’t be around for long.” They even plug the now-deceased Buffett in the closing credits. But the idiots from BAHS-ton spell it “Buffet.”

Because that’s on brand in this half-assed, unfocused “appreciation” of a pal who probably needs to watch this sober at least once to see how “happy” he says he is and how wrung-out he looks. This isn’t an appreciation. It’s an intervention that lost its nerve.

Rating: unrated, lots of profanity, smoking and alcohol abuse

Cast: Tom Dustin, Joe List

Credits: Directed by Joe List. A Matson Films release.

Running time: 1:36