Movie Nation

So what has Hollywood shoved down our throats too often and for too long over recent decades?

Hit-man movies –as thrillers and comedies. And Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. The aged body builder’s slide into irrelevance probably won’t be halted by a Saban Films release. “Killing Gunther” is about a team of also-rans (actors, as well as the characters they play) trying to get “the world’s #1 hit-man,” the top dog in “the hit-man industry.”

Only in the movies do either of those things exist. Only in the movies is Arnold still working way past his expiration date. Why hasn’t he reached for cable? Oh. Right. His movies, with rare exceptions, are violent, lazy paycheck pictures for mouth-breathers.

The long strange odyssey of Christian Bale’s Oscar-winning/cape wearing career takes another turn with “Hostiles,” a Western of moral ambiguity, dust and violence.

Back in the Golden Age of Movies, leading men had benchmark roles. You did your combat film, your cop roles, your boxing picture, your Westerns. Bruce Willis was the last big star to complete that cycle. Now Christian Bale rides among the sagebrush.

“Hostiles” is slated for later this year.

A little “Kinsey,” a hint of “The Whole Wide World,” and the secret history of the character who inspired the year’s biggest box office hit — “Wonder Woman.” And the story of the man, the two women he loved (and who loved each other) whose personalities contributed to Wonder Woman. Looks fascinating, and tres kinky.

“American Made” gives Tom Cruise his “Goodfellas,” and brings Doug “The Bourne Identity” Liman back from the directing wilderness.

In Barry Seal, Cruise has a real person to bite into, a drawling, unquestioning, self-delusional anti-hero who parlayed gonzo flying skills to an integral role in an anti-communist crusade that devolved into an epic American debacle of The Greed Decade.

And he got filthy rich off Medellin drug cartel money in the bargain.

It’s “Blow” and “Air America” and “Narcos” all rolled into one laugh-through-the-grimaces romp, a picture so clever its damning history lesson may be ignored by those who don’t know history, and cannot recognize when it repeats itself.

Gary Spinelli’s script is built around mid-80s self-confessional videotapes in which Seal/Cruise tells all, tracking through his boring Baton Rouge life with his cheerleader-hot Baton Rouge wife (Sarah Wright), a TWA pilot recruited out of endless tedious “Welcome to Bakersfield” hops and into covert photographic work by the CIA, in the person of Agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson).

As Barry is a tad reckless — “I do tend to lead before I look.” — with the tiny taint of corruption (sneaking Cuban cigars into the country) about him, he buys in.

But what starts with taking photos of insurgent groups in the jungles of Central America quickly morphs into using his CIA-provided twin-engine plane to bring cocaine into Louisiana from Colombia. Rising kingpins Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda), Carlos Ledher (Fredy Yate Escobar) and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) make him an offer he cannot refuse.

And as it’s a challenge, to survive overloaded take-offs and murderously trigger-happy employers, one that pays him suitcases full of cash, Seal goes all in.

“I’m just a gringo who always delivers,” he grins.

Of course he grins. He’s Tom Cruise. But he dials down the swagger as the screenplay has Seal recall the thrills, the insanity and “patriotic duty” of it all with barely a trace of irony. As his family grows and his operation expands, sassy wife Lucy does what any made man’s bride would do. She asks few questions until after the fact, complies with affection and doesn’t worry about the mounds of cash buried in the backyard of their airport-side property in rural Arkansas.

“Daddy’s done lost his mind,” she says to comfort their small children on the night of a hasty “We’ve got to get out of town” moment.

Liman makes great use of Cruise’s ability to project physical competence — in the cockpit, making that first CIA delivery of guns to the backwoods thugs, the Contras of Nicaragua (they mug him), not totally panicking whenever the cartel hirelings joke around, threatening his life.

Cruise lets us wonder about Seal’s bravery and smarts. There’s bravado, not heroism, native cunning here, not deep thought. The character is flippant, and the film reflects this — glibly ignoring the consequences of all these off-the-books shenanigans, keeping death (if not the threat of it) mostly off-camera.

It’s a piece of history that many Americans — especially those of “There’s space on Mount Rushmore to put Ronald Reagan!” persuasion — choose to forget. As Seal flies his guns, drugs, Contras triangle for the Reagan White House, Central America and Colombia are permanently destabilized, causing decades of violence and a tidal wave of illegal immigrant refugees.

North America is narcotized — flooded with drugs. Contras slip out of their U.S. training camp and into the U.S. population. And there’s Ron and Nancy, on TV, “Just say no,” they say. And the whole illegal enterprise is crowned with criminal collusion with an enemy of the United States – Iran — the Iran-Contra Scandal. So yeah, let’s put the original criminal dotard Reagan on the dollar bill.

Whatever lessons for today “American Made” might offer, Cruise, Liman and Spinelli never let those consequences and the epic culture of corruption they came from spoil a good joke — dodging the FBI, DEA and ATF, earning a “get out of Arkansas jail free” phone call from Governor Bill Clinton (directed to do it by the Reagan White House).

The details are dazzling, endless “pizza delivery” orders from the CIA and from the cartel on rows of Mena, Arkansas pay-phones, grand parties with the drug lords in Colombia, blessed by their own bought-and-paid-for priests. And the nuts-and-bolts of the work — the precision flying, the money laundering and cash impact on a small town that looks the other way — make other movies and TV shows on the subject seem humorless and tame.

Just don’t think too much about the myriad bills that came due after the conviction (without jail time) of Col. Oliver North, or the staggering body count. That might spoil all the fun.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Alejandro Edda

Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, script by Gary Spinelli. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:55

“Abundant Acreage Available” is an intimate, warm and slightly screwball dramedy about country people old enough to fret over where they’ll be buried, and what constitutes “our land.”

It’s an indie film that reminds us of a world of actors Hollywood rarely uses playing characters who never turn up in mainstream films. And it’s set in a tiny corner of a vast country that the film industry is generally loathe to explore — the home stomping grounds of playwright, writer/director Angus MacLachlan (“Junebug,” “Goodbye to All That”) — central North Carolina.

We meet siblings Tracy (Amy Ryan) and Jesse (Terry Kinney) as she’s burying their dad. His remains are in a cardboard box and the perfect place to put him, she figures, is in the middle of their farm, amidst the stubble of last-year’s corn crop.

Under the bare trees of winter, they shiver a bit and bicker a lot.

“I think, uh…”

“I don’t care WHAT you think! This is his place, here with us, with his two kids for eternity!”

Jesse is a religious man, a Southern “type” — a “Big Mistake Christian.” Some disaster in his past made him reach for the lifeline and comfort that the Bible and church offered. He wants to “say some words,” but she isn’t having it. He declares he’s going to move the ashes to an old graveyard on the property. Even though those buried there aren’t from their family, it’s still “consecrated ground.” This just irks her further.

They don’t weep as they doggedly pack up their father’s few late-life possessions — a hospital bed, wheelchair, walker and medications.

And then one morning they wake up to the sight of a tent with three old men snoring in it on their 50 acres. Jesse is puzzled. Tracy just grabs a shotgun to punctuate her lecture about trespassing.

But Hans, Charles and Tom grew up on this farm, long ago. Their parents sold it to Jesse and Tracy’s dad. Now, Tom (Francis Guinan) uses a cane and has the unfiltered filthy mouth of a stroke victim, Hans (Max Gail) has a serene kindness that calms troubled waters. Charles (Steve Coulter) is the practical one, not wanting to impose, just wanting to get the car they drove up from Orlando fixed so they can leave now that they’ve seen the farm and the wooden, weathered 19th century farmhouse.

Tracy is alternately irritated and wary. But Jesse tends to see things as signs.

“God’s looking out for us, sending them here.”

And before you know it, he’s walking all over Tracy’s wishes, making plans to sell or give away either part of the farm or the whole thing to atone for some sin neither of them had anything to do with.

“Acreage” is a movie of little grace notes about the permanence of land, the impermanence of people, things and everything else.

“It’s all temporary,” Hans philosophizes. Finding an arrowhead in the dirt, hearing about this illness or that, remarking on flocks of starlings (an invasive bird species) or staring at the stars just underlines that.

Stage, TV and big screen veteran Kinney gives Jesse a weariness about life and the emotional rawness of a lost soul deep into the faith that is all that lets his life make sense.

Ryan gives Tracy a mercurial bite — veering from the obligations of “Southern hospitality” and the pent-up resentment of a woman who gave her life to caring for the dead father and a foolishly impulsive brother, coupled with an innate mistrust of city strangers.

There’s rarely a false note in the performances, even if much of what happens feels abrupt and part of someone’s (the writer/director’s, not the Almighty’s) plan. Characters, not just the stroke victim, tend to blurt out plans and “fantastic ideas” that leave Tracy — the sanest one here — dumbfounded.

The characters are homespun and vividly real even if the story unfolds in comfortable, easygoing melodramatic flourishes involving family legacies, dead fathers and land — Sam Shepard without the edge. Down to Earth folks in rural America talk about mortality differently than city people, and there isn’t a line of dialogue on that subject that doesn’t ring true.

But what’s most striking is the film’s palpable sense of place, the wintry scenes of people walking land that has, between them, formed generations of both families. I know a little something about that part of the world. Visit the Wikipedia page for East Bend for proof.  “Acreage” is so embedded in that earth you can taste it, smell the tobacco, cedar and slowly rotting corn stalks on those gently sloping hills.

And that firms up the characters and their connection to that land, making the film’s thesis, that there’s a genetic bond — at least in the South or to people who come from farming stock — to the place where they came from and the place that, at the end of life, calls them home.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Amy Ryan, Terry Kinney, Max Gail, Steve Coulter, Francis Guinan

Credits: Written and directed by Angus MacLachlan. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

If Dame Judi Dench was going to revisit one of her great roles in the twilight of her storied career, it had to be Queen Victoria.

Her take on the sad, autocratic, fat, lonely grump who ruled over the British Empire at its peak was a career highlight, showing the iconic queen’s vulnerable side in “Mrs. Brown.” 

Recent scholarship about another particular friend of the widowed queen provided the inspiration for “Victoria & Abdul,” a send-up of Victorian conservatism that is “based on a true story — mostly.” And start to finish, it’s bloody delightful, a romp “mostly.”

As the ageing Victoria heads into her Golden Jubilee, the Empire’s rulers the The Raj (India) strike a commemorative coin. They press a tall, impressive-looking jail clerk, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) and a grumpier, shorter draftee (Adeel Akhtar) into service to deliver it to her as a grand royal banquet.

Their escort, Mr. Bigge (Robin Soans) and the various royal decorum enforcers who instruct them have one over-riding edict. “You must not look her in the eye.”

Abdul does, and gives her a smile. And thus does a great little-known friendship between ruler and servant begin.

The Empress of India has found her biggest Muslim fan, and Abdul, with his musical accent and tales of the lost love that inspired the Taj Mahal, the glories of Indian architecture and the opulence of the subcontinent’s rulers, enchants her.

Which troubles, then enrages her Head of the Royal Household (the slack-jawed Tim Pigott-Smith) and her ageing wastrel of an heir apparent, Bertie (a marvelously blustering Eddie Izzard). The insults, veiled and unveiled racism of one and all (Olivia Williams is Lady Churchill, no “lady” at all) pour forth.

There are mixed signals, confused intentions all around. And the source of it all is her “most obedient servant,” her sounding board, the man who would teach her Urdu “because Hindi is of the lower classes,” her instructor in the Koran.

It’s delightful to think of this dowdy old woman being this curious about the world into her dotage, determined to learn something of her Empire through a man who only wants to please her, to brighten her days. A weary monarch tired of life and power learns something of what life is all about from this humble man of India — “service.”

And Abdul and his reluctant sidekick Muhammad (Akhtar)?

“How do you like your new Scottish clothes?”

“They’re very scratchy, ma’am.”

“Everything in Scotland is scratchy.

Director Stephen Frears (“Philomena,” “The Queen”) gives Dench’s return to the role of Victoria a splendid build-up. She’s ancient, doddering, has to be helped out of bed, dressed and marched through every dreary day of her Jubilee. She speed-slurps her soup and sprints through meals, a near slob whose dinner guests must likewise race to polish off a course before she does, lest they leave the table hungry.

“Victoria & Abdul” spares no expense in peopling the glorious settings of Empire, from Windsor Castle to Balmoral to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight with legions of red-coated servants and scores of over-dressed guests at court. It’s a gorgeously detailed look at the empty opulence of an era.

Dench, who spoke of retirement a couple of years back (she’s going blind), manages some lovely moments of empathy, outrage and wounded vulnerability. Surrounding her with the likes of Michael Gambon (her prime minister, Lord Salisbury) is only her due.

Fazal’s Abdul is less fully drawn in. The character can seem opportunistic, vain, a bit full of himself as he rises in the ranks thanks to his student’s patronage. He glories in his uniforms, with the gold brocade “VR” (Victoria Regina) embroidered upon his chest. He is a Muslim eager for acceptance in the modern West.

But Fazal rarely has more to play than guileless. For a movie about racism, repression and class distinction, “passive” is a troubling take on the character. It never quite crosses over into patronizing, however. The Lee Hall script gives the whole picture the air of a comical “sick burn” of colonialism and ethnocentrism, and leaves all the British-hating fury to Muhammad, which tends to balance things out.

The picture remembers “Mrs. Brown,” but tilts towards “The King & I” in its light tone and jolly befuddlement. Perhaps that’s all we’re meant to take from this post-Brexit jab at British racism, that cultural exchanges, not cultural clashes, are how we grow and come to know those we dismiss, resent or fear.

Either way, this comical poke at the people who invented most of the world’s racial slurs could not have come at a better time, for Britain and for the Queen of Actresses, Dame Judi, back to playing one of her greatest roles and managing it, as always, with acrid wit and style.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and language

Cast: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Tim Pigott-Smith, Michael Gambon, Olivia Williams, Adeel Akhtar

Credits: Directed by Stephen Frears, script by Lee Hall, based on the  Shrabani Basu book. A Focus Features release. 

Running time: 1:52

So the Danish toymaker LEGO just announced massive layoffs because kids aren’t buying enough of their snap-together designer toys.

Their latest movie isn’t helping the bottom line all that much. “The LEGO Ninjago Movie” opened to a paltry (for animation) $20 million last weekend. Variety reports Warners spent a fortune on TV advertising on the monstrosity. And all it did was tip filmgoers — especially the young — that it isn’t very funny.

Heaven knows I avoided seeing it as long as I could.

But hey, there’s the new interactive Ninjago Ride to pull in park patrons at LEGOland California and LEGOland Florida. So maybe all this corporate synergy — movies that sell toys and theme park tickets, toys that draw moviegoers and park visitors — will pay off down the line.

Because darned if there’s an honest to Pete laugh in this film. “Ninjago,” with its slapdash script by like a dozen credited (story and screenplay) writers, three directors and 101 minutes of talking, kung-fu fighting plastic toys, should send this franchise back to direct-to-video where it belongs.

After the unexpected delights and Oscar-winning song of “The LEGO Movie,” “Ninjago” shows LEGO movies jumpingthe shark — literally.

A city not-unlike Hong Kong — Hey, LEGOland Shanghai opens in 2022, coindence I’m sure. — Ninjago lives under the menace of a four-armed villain named Garmadon, voiced by Justin Theroux.

And no slap at Theroux, but if you can’t get Will Arnett to do your dark-voiced wise-cracker villain (or hero), maybe don’t make the movie.

Garmadon terrorizes Ninjago from his volcanic lair just offshore, leading his minions (no, Universal doesn’t own the label) and their “mechs” (cool LEGO gadget planes, subs, etc.) in raids, shooting sharks at the natives, sharks who go “Num num num num num” as they rain down on all the plastic people.

A team of six young ninjas are all that can stop him, ninjas whose skills are named for water, ice, fire, earth and who-cares-what-the-others-are?

One of them is Lloyd (Dave Franco), who just happens to be Garmadon’s son. They’re so estranged the villain doesn’t know how to pronounce his kid’s name — “Luh-Lloyd.” Two ‘l’s,’ right?

Things get bad enough where the ninjas have to call upon “the ultimate weapon.” Hint, it’s something that the big, furry pet that is the bane of LEGO kids the world over, a joke given away in the trailers, is crazy for. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always “the ultimate ULTIMATE weapon.”

And the quest that may bring father and son back together is to the “Temple of Fragile Foundations.” Eleven credited writers, back-engineering jokes into a movie designed to sell toys, and that’s what they came up with.

The story is told by a Chinese curiosity shop owner (Jackie Chan) to a little boy who comes in to see his wares in a live-action prologue. That casting will also help with the Chinese market, though it does zilch for the movie.

The slangy-jokey dialogue is of the “I’m totes profesh” variety, the best musical gag is the Chinese flute-playing teacher, Master Wu (Chan again) bleeping out “It’s a Hard Knock Life.”

In other words, the dull, exhausted toy ad that the TV commercials for this film prophesied came true. Unless you’re totes’ ‘sessed with plastic toys fighting, flirting and telling lame jokes, “Ninjago” has nothing to offer.

As a franchise, LEGO movies are toast. Totes’.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Jackie Chan, Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Fred Armisen, Michael Pena, Abbi Jacobson, Ali Wong, Charlene Yi

Credits: Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan, script by Bob Logan, Paul Fisher, Tom Wheeler, William Wheeler, Jared Stern and John Whittington A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:41

“Immortality is only a question of time!” enthuses the good Dr. West (Julio Perillan) in promotional appearances for his company, Prodigy, and its “Lazarus Project.”

As this is somewhere in the not-terribly-distant future, the “time” is now. Lazarus is all about resurrecting the cryogenically dead.

But as Patient Zero in this project ponders in his narration, is that what “humanity’s greatest dream” really is?

Writer-director Mateo Gil (“Open Your Eyes,” “The Sea Inside”) mulls this over in the moody, chatty science fiction drama “Realive,” tackling one of the oldest tropes in all of sci fi.

Marc (Tom Hughes of British TV’s “Victoria”) was a handsome young ad agency owner, diagnosed with incurable throat cancer. He’s got a year to live, and his ex-girlfriend Naomi (Oona Chaplin of “Quantum of Solace”) is determined to spend it with him. She’ll make every minute count, make up for every minute they didn’t get to spend together and never, ever let the thought of “she wants to get into the will” enter the conversation.

Because this is true love.

But Marc makes other plans, researching cryogenics — the means of freezing a body until that future date that science can revive it, repair its fatal damage and bring you back to life.

And it’s worked, in Marc’s case. We know, because he’s narrating for “you, in the future.” We see that resurrection, hear him grouse about the downside of being brought back (using the Lazarus scene from Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” to make his point).

Gil creates a familiarly austere, polished and underpopulated future of pristine labs, mood lighting and updated medical uniforms. He gives Marc the classic “Now that I’m awake” questions.

“Does everybody have spaceships? Do people live on Mars?”

Charlotte LeBon (“The Hundred Foot Journey”) is Marc’s personal nurse, his “partner” in his recovering in this less sexually complicated future. No, “couple” is an old-fashioned concept, as out of date as slavery. So yes, sex is on the table. Ahem.

But one item of future-tech that our writer-director includes leaves some lumps in the batter. MindWriter is a wearable gadget that lets you summon up all manner of memories. And Marc, tripping through the cruelty of childhood, the pranks of his teens and the magic of first love, begins to question this highly technical/surgically invasive (gory muscle insertion/organ replacement scenes abound) quest for something that isn’t going to improve upon the short life he lived, or the love he feels for long-gone Naomi.

“Why do we never feel anything that intense again?”

It’s up to Chaplin, you-know-who’s granddaughter, to give the picture it’s great moment of angst and heart. “Your life is not yours alone,” she reminds Marc. Go ahead, freeze yourself and come back in the future. But “Who is going to CARE about you?”

Gil is flirting with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” territory here, but he’s not quite able to summon up the romantic longing, the wistful memories of the past of that film. Some of it is in the performances, but most of it falls back on tone. The frosty, omnipresent voice-over, the cool blue lighting, the blueish set design (splashes of bloody crimson jolt us), the muted voices all rob the picture of drama and heightened emotions.

Technically spare and smart, fascinating in the dilemma it wrestles with, “Realive” is, in the end, too chilly to warm up to.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with surgical gore, sex scenes and profanity

Cast: Tom Hughes, Charlotte Le Bon, Oona Chaplin, Julio Perillan

Credits: Written and directed by Mateo Gil. A SyFy Films release.

Running time: 1:47

Back when he made his documentary about the calling, the life and the difficult work that being a stand-up comedian is —“Comedian” — Jerry Seinfeld gave voice, in interviews (with me and others) that his sole ambition, after his wildly successful sitcom ended, was to get back to performing live.

It wasn’t about money. He’s been stupidly, Porsche-collecting rich since “Seinfeld.” And it wasn’t really about ego. Well, maybe a little.

He wanted to go back to playing live shows — trying out material in small clubs, touring it in pricier venues — for the ongoing challenge, the need to work and to set in stone his place in the historic stand-up continuum.

He idolizes the great comics of his youth, who did TV shows, made movies and the like. But what he most admired and identified with was the work ethic, the compulsion to perform, the process of finding an observation, seeing what’s funny in it and polishing that into a comic gem that fit in with a whole set — a routine.

“Comedian” — hunt it down if you missed it, most people did — was the most naked we’ll ever see him, stumbling through sets with note cards, “starting over” the hard way in tiny clubs, failing to get laughs, losing his place. Failing. Identifying with an angry young comic whose (failed) career closely paralleled his own in the other half of the movie’s narrative.

In the years since, he’s done more TV — failed shows that one suspects he was begged to do by a desperate network — and the hilarious and off-the-cuff web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” But those are just play. The real work is going on tour, like Robert Klein and George Carlin, David Steinberg, Phyllis Diller and Shelly Berman and even Henny Youngman before him — a road warrior, a comic survivor.

“Jerry Before ‘Seinfeld'” is a Netflix special that lets Jerry tell the story of his career, to visit the childhood home in Massepequa, Long Island, where he discovered there was this thing called “stand-up” by watching Ed Sullivan and “The Tonight Show.”

And it takes him back to the club where he auditioned, got his start and worked “for FREE” — New York’s Comic Strip — back 1976.

There aren’t a lot of interviews. Plenty of TV documentaries have covered that ground. There’s just a stage, a few Seinfeld props (Whoa!) and the decades-polished Jerry more or less running through his Greatest Hits.

There’s new material here, but in telling the Cliff Notes/Funny Bits version of his autobiography, “engaged at 29,” etc., he showcases “my first joke” on stage that worked — the bit about “left handed” and all the negative connotations we attach to “left.” And his “second joke.”

And there are all the jokes he doesn’t ID as “oldies but goodies,” the bits about the secret ambitions of clothes, socks “making a break for it” from the dryer. I watched this, and flipped on “Seinfeld” re-runs, where much of this material existed in a previous form — the stand-up bits that opened and closed the seminal 1990s series.

Of course the jokes themselves are even older than that — dating back to their stand-up origins in the ’70s and ’80s (He made his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1981).

I’ve always connected Seinfeld, in my mind, with his pal Jay Leno — guys who love the work,t he challenge of getting a laugh out of a fresh audience every night. “Jerry Before ‘Seinfeld'” — which flashes on images of his idols and his contemporaries — Elayne Boosler, Andy Kaufman and others — connects him more closely with those who developed an act and more or less stayed with it.

It’s not contemporary. There’s never a hint of politics. Every joke made at his expense on “Seinfeld,” from “When’re you coming up with some new material?” to “Is it another ‘Didya ever NOTICE?'” — lands hard and true.

I once sat in a Hollywood hotel bar in the early 1990s, swapping notes with fellow entertainment journalists about the “worst” (toughest) interviews we’d ever had. Seinfeld, especially pre-“Seinfeld,” topped the list. Angry, testy, dismissive. He’s not that way (much) any more. The confidence and ease of success rubbed some of that off. The shortest stand-up interview I ever had was with him in 1988, just before the series came out. You could feel the eye-rolls through the phone.

So if you’re curious enough to learn about the “real” Seinfeld — and the unguarded Jerry can be testy and still doesn’t want hugs, the world poring over his personal life, professional rivalries and romantic history — you’re going to have to go someplace else. Because unless your memory’s going (Whose isn’t?), nothing here will surprise you enough to get a fresh laugh.

Cast: Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Brogan, Mark Schiff

Directed by Michael Bonfiglio, written by Jerry Seinfeld. A Netflix production.

Running time: 1:02

Over the decades, “queer cinema” has largely confined itself to three basic plots.

There were dramas about about transgression, furtive love or lust, and persecution for “the love that dare not speak its name.” “Prick Up Your Ears” and most genre films that preceded it fell in this category.

There were the “embodiment of gay” frolics/weepers, all cinematic sons and daughters of “The Boys in the Band” or “The Birdcage.”

And there was the longest running trope of all, the melodrama (or comedy) of “confusion and discovery.” It’s the most popular gay sub-genre, so commonplace that “In & Out” could knowingly send it up during the Golden Age of “Will & Grace,” twenty years ago.

“Beach Rats” revisits that pain of confusion, parking a gay teen smack in the middle of an age of “alleged” tolerance, but running with the pack — Coney Island punks whose reaction we can guess if Frankie (Harris Dickerson) was to reveal his true nature to his pack.

They swim at the beach, hang around the amusement park where they compare skills and feats of strength in the arcade. They share drugs — pot and whatever pills Frankie steals that are meant to ease his comatose father’s pain as he dies of cancer.

And they check out the girls who come to check out the fireworks, brag about conquests and peer pressure each other as they do.

This is where pretty boy Frankie edges into the background. They don’t need to know about the Brooklyn Boys live sex chat room where he hangs out.

“Do you like what you see?” the stripped online cruisers (most of them older than Frankie) want to know.

“I don’t really know what I like.” At least he’s being honest. He’s curious.

But crossing paths with the “intimidatingly pretty girl” Simone (Madeline Weinstein) forces his hand. The boy with “the sad blue eyes” meets the girl all the other boys salivate over “on the boardwalk, under the fireworks.”

And he can’t admit that’s romantic. He’d rather be rude to her than risk humiliation and exposure when forced to put up or shut up.

That’s the core conflict writer-director Eliza Hittman (“It Felt Like Love”) digs into. And the choice she parks in front of her hero is frankly, a bit out of date and problematic.

Frankie can take on a “relationship” with a beauty who might meet the approval of his grieving mom (Kate Hodge). Or he can wholly commit to a life of sordid highway rest-stop hook-ups arranged with online gay exhibitionists with a taste for the old-fashioned danger of anonymous rough trade.

Take Simone on dates, convince himself to have sex with her, look troubled at every other image of a “normal” couple they pass by (his kid sister is just starting her own romantic life). Or haunt the night with strangers, learning about his sexuality with creeps.

To make up for her frankly-retro and problematic storyline, Hittman (“It Felt Like Love”) paints in a just-out-of-high-school world of Brooklyn’s “Avenue Z,” vape shops, hot dog stands, limited Coney Island horizons and the extremes these “Beach Rats” will go to in order to score something to smoke, pop or snort.

Frankie does what teens have always done — just tries to fit in. And if that means sex with a girl, that’s less risky than being found out.

The melodramatic possibilities here, given the circumstances our writer-director sets up, never lapse into The Dark Old Days. She revels in showing us full frontal nudity and gay sex, along with attitudes that aren’t anywhere near society’s current sexual cutting edge.

“Two girls making out? That’s hot,” Simone explains. “Two guys? That’s just gay.”

There’s nothing new here. This isn’t daring in the way  “L.I.E.” was, or decades of gay films before it might have been. But this gritty, cell-phone video-quality drama does a more than passable job of renewing an exploration of the trauma of coming out, decades after Ellen, “Will & Grace” and Harvey Fierstein singing torch songs.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language

Cast: Harris Dickerson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge, Harrison Sheehan

Credits:Written and directed by Eliza Hittman. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:38