Movie Nation

We’ve had decades to make up our minds about the scandalous Woody Allen-Mia Farrow split, with its horrific allegations of child sexual abuse.

Newsweek, “60 Minutes” and others helped us come to a conclusion about all this right after the scandal went public in 1992 — by interviewing and profiling the “press-shy” Woody.

Allen suddenly started publicizing his films for the first time in decades. Journalists like me got access. I interviewed him several times between the mid 90s into the 2000s. Shy. Deer-in-headlights at times. Disarming. But a pedophile?

Mia Farrow’s memoir “What Falls Away” showed us rage, neediness and just a touch of airy-fairy second-generation Hollywood ditziness. Still, she revealed Allen’s cultivated “intellectual” and “simple genius” image-management efforts. His pricey but intentionally rumpled wardrobe? A pose. He’d don one of his many shapeless (tailored) overcoats and “carelessly” floppy hats and slip into his chauffeured Rolls Royce.

The documentary “Wild Man Blues” captured Allen on tour in Europe, somewhat candidly, showing us a Soon Yi who is her own woman married to a flakey fussbudget who might change hotels over the location of the shower drain.

Allen’s own memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” takes pains to further dissect, discredit and explain away the allegations in detail. Decades have passed, memories fade. He takes advantage of that. Sure, there’s a hint of smugness in Allen’s dismissals. Does that mean he isn’t telling the truth?

A flattering Soon Yi Allen “Vulture” profile assails Farrow’s parenting and alters our perception of her. Her adoptive brother Moses, now a family therapist, writes a blog post eviscerating Farrow’s parenting and and endorses the idea that his sister Dylan, the alleged victim, was “coached” into making the original accusation.

Back and forth it goes.

Is “Allen v. Farrow,” HBO’s four-part series on this cringe-worthy scandal just another swing of the pendulum? Or are we presented with the last word, the damning evidence that “cancel culture” got its man when Dylan Farrow kept repeating and reviving her charges, finally with famous journalist brother Ronan Farrow amplifying them?

Directors Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick (“Outrage,” “The Hunting Ground”) turn over stones, reveal long-concealed documents and tapes, revisit the couple’s history (Allen appears reading from the audio book version of his memoir) and dig into the specifics and legal particulars of what happened.

What they don’t do is give any credence to Allen’s deflections and counter claims. So if we’re watching a “trial” here, what we get is only the prosecution’s side. You keep waiting for the Allen “side” to be presented, even though he makes his case in his book on tape readings.

Several Farrows, starting with Mia, her sister and adoptive daughter Dylan, dominate the four-plus hours of screen time. Farrow “family friends” such as Carly Simon, a former French tutor for the kids, all weigh in.

If you only watch the first two episodes of “Allen v. Farrow,” you might notice that even the reporters, young film critics and “freelance writers” fleshing out Allen’s career and reputation and telling this supposedly two-sided story are almost to a one all women.

And if you’re listening to the accounts, you realize a lot of what we’re being served is third hand, “hearsay.” Some actual eyewitnesses recall things they say, that seemed “off” about Allen’s “obsession” with a little girl Farrow had adopted and Allen adopted himself shortly thereafter. But there’s a grating sense that a lot of what we’re seeing is people opining about things they don’t know first hand or which lie beyond their pay grade.

A writer for Vox and another for The Paris Review, a freelancer here and a freelancer there, aren’t given screen credentials that explain their presence or expertise. Where are the many Woody Allen biographers? You know, real experts? Were the journalists who appear here “cast” just to say what the filmmakers wanted to hear?

Can we really psychoanalyze the man via his movies? As Farrow herself wrote, there’s a lot of “pose” there. But maybe we can. Looking at his screenplay drafts and abandoned projects in his collected papers at Princeton show some disturbing obsessions. And if “Manhattan” doesn’t make you cringe, well…

What Dick and Ziering do — with all this court evidence, all these tape recordings Allen made of his phone arguments with Farrow after the Soon Yi nude photos and Dylan assault, all the court papers, the “Yale New Haven” hospital “report” commissioned by the Connecticut State Police but which the doctor in charge, John Leventhal, released to Allen, allowing him to hold a press conference on the hospital steps claiming “exoneration” — is attack Allen’s central threat to Farrow, the one that’s battered her for decades.

The truth is less important than “perception,” he sneered or inferred in their phone conversations. So the filmmakers unleash a tsunami of legally proven truth, as well as the circumstantial evidence and hearsay, that utterly drowns Allen’s “plausible deniability,” his professed outrage over the charges, the laughed-out-of-court “custody battle” counter suit he launched to bend public opinion.

The threatening phone calls we listen in on are damning all by themselves. Allen comes off as a rich, powerful, publicly-adored creep telling poor Farrow what was going to happen to her when he got done with her. And damned if he didn’t make it come true.

Allen went back to making his movies, living his life of comfort, fame and wealth, summoning his pick of actors and actresses, winning Oscars for actresses with his films. He even returned to visiting (British) chat shows, joking about how “unlikeable” he’s always been, so “nothing’s changed.”

Lionized, feted, and then came that 2014 night at the Golden Globes, where Diane Keaton, Emma Stone and others sang Allen’s praises as he was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, pretending nothing had ever happened. Dylan Farrow and Ronan decided to start reminding everybody what Hollywood and the rest of us were forgetting.

Child. Molester. Dylan was just seven years old when it happened.

“Allen v. Farrow” does a decent enough job with the context of the times — all of the times, the 1992-93 eruption, the more recent #MeToo era that revived the charges, which were never taken to trial. And it’s great at getting at the outrageous parts of this story, the sense that justice was denied, that New York and Hollywood and the media in general just didn’t want to believe, charge or do anything at all about this.

It’s helpful hearing how the relationship between Allen and Farrow began, and seeing home movies of Farrow’s ever-expanding brood is explained if not understood.

In setting out to get their man, Ziering and Dick leave a lot out, much of it the source of decades of understandable doubt in the media and public mind about the charges and the “bizarre” family dynamic that might have provoked our skepticism. Moses Farrow isn’t here, merely his brothers Fletcher and Ronan refuting Moses’ charges about Mia.

But Ziering and Dick have Ronan Farrow dissect how Big Time PR can twist a narrative, discredit accusers and punish journalists, film people and others for not toeing the line. And he should know, having fought the Harvey Weinstein machine to the death.

As with many series like this, there’s repetition and overkill. Mia Farrow speaking for herself silences much of the image-smearing she’s endured. But the long sampling of home movies reinforcing her reasons for her many adoptions don’t remove the nagging notion that “How did she give them attention?” and with so many kids, “What was she missing that was going on?”

Who is Ronan Farrow’s real father? And is the magazine gossip about Farrow and Allen’s sexual adventures early in the relationship true? Because it might be germane. I don’t get the impression any Farrow was asked a question they weren’t eager to answer here.

Bloated or streamlined, unbalanced or “She said, he said,” and even with a “Let culture off the hook” equivocated ending, “Allen v. Farrow” still manages to do what Connecticut and New York justice didn’t. The provable lies we hear Allen tell, the evidence that we either never heard or don’t remember reading about, leave no doubt.

Yes, he’s canceled. And yes, the old creep still got off too easy.

MPA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Mia Farrow, Dylan Farrow, Carly Simon, Fletcher Previn, Tisa Farrow, Rosanna Scotto, Maureen Orth

Credits: Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering. An HBO release.

Running time: Four episodes @55-1:15 each

The final act of a thriller is where the payoff lies.

We’ve invested in the characters and relationships. We fear for them, and as we do, the suspense should build to the point where it weighs on you.

“The Violent Heart” has that weight about it right from the start. And if the climax seems wanting, perhaps one twist too many, it still doesn’t spoil the mystery we see unfold and the solutions we have time to consider over its 100 or so minutes.

A 13 year-old gearhead (Jordan Preston Carter of “Shaft”) trouble-shoots his motorbike, and wonders why his sister (Rayven Symone Ferrell) has turned all clingy on him.

She doesn’t seem that thrilled when their Marine officer Dad comes home on leave. Later that night, Daniel follows Wendy when she sneaks out with a suitcase and slips into a stranger’s car. He trails her and her lover into the woods, hears shots, and stumbles into the grave that the man he just saw embracing her dropped her into.

Years later, Daniel (Jovan Adepo of “Fences” and “Watchmen”) is a quiet, sad-faced and withdrawn 24 year-old mechanic with dreams of following his Dad into the Corps.

So when the cute high school senior Cassie (Grace Van Patten of “The Wilde Wedding” and The Meyerowitz Stories”) with a busted serpentine belt begs a ride off him, he’s wary. When she calls him later that night, he’s leery. Beyond leery.

“Why ISN’T it a good idea?” she wants to know.

“It just isn’t.”

Daniel has a past we’ve seen, and more past that we haven’t. Cassie has no idea about either of these two big pieces of who he is. And Daniel, cautious as any young Black man would be about the attentions of a blonde teen in rural Tennessee, doesn’t know what happened to Cassie at school.

She caught her English teacher-dad (Lukas Haas) locked in his class after hours with a colleague. Mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) doesn’t know. Is Cassie acting-out by being all flirty and forward? Was she interested in Daniel before this?

Writer-director Karem Senga (“Trigger Finger,” “The First Girl I Loved”) takes a decent shot at misdirecting us here and there. But we know the trauma of Daniel’s childhood will come back up, and we might have a clue how.

Adepo plays Daniel as focused but damaged. The attentions of a very pretty and, as she bluntly suggests, of legal consent, young woman are a distraction he’s never had.

Van Patten makes Cassie naive to the point of reckless. We get no hint of guile or revenge against Dad in this sudden interest in a handsome mechanic, but we wonder.

Haas comes off as the doting Dad from the start, a bit rattled by what his daughter almost walked in on, or thinks she walked in on.

And Mary J. Blige brings gravitas and compassion to Nina, Daniel’s mother, a woman struggling to get him on the right track and correct the other kid under her roof, Aaron (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) before he makes a wrong turn.

Senga’s film is overcast and grey, first scene to last, which contributes to a downbeat tone, an unease that isn’t shaken by the illusion of this ray of light that’s come into Daniel’s life. We never buy it, and truthfully, as nice as the chemistry is, that relationship seems more a plot necessity than anything with serious cost-benefit value to either character.

But if you’re willing to take teenage-impulsiveness at face value, let it slide. Even the twists at the end don’t deviate from the message, a burden Daniel’s carried his entire life.

“Anger is tricky…You carry it around with you long enough, you stop noticing. You become an angry person.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violent, sexuality

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Grace Van Patten, Lukas Haas, Jordan Preston Carter, Rayven Symone Ferrell, Kimberly Williams-Paisley and Mary J. Blige

Credits: Scripted and directed by Karem Senga. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:42

Quiver had already announced it was re-issuing Ashley Judd’s breakout film, “Ruby in Paradise,” long before she had a near-disastrous accident in the Congo that put her in the news.

Thankfully we can dive back into “Ruby” not as a funereal tribute, but just as an exercise in how a “Star was Born,” thanks to an indie cinema icon and a role that showed she was much more than the Judd who doesn’t sing.

Yes, her Momma and sister had made the surname famous before Florida filmmaker Victor Nunez cast her in his reflective, feminist run-off-to-a-beach-town-to-find-myself melodrama. But the least-famous Judd made a dazzling impression in a rare, quiet, female-centered story from the glory days of American Independent Cinema — the early ’90s.

Set in Panama City Beach, it’s about a Manning, Tennessee 20something who runs off with her boyfriend’s or her daddy’s 1970 Malibu (That’s unclear.), getting out of town “before I got pregnant or beat up,” she declares as a point of honor.

“Ruby” follows her on a job hunt, finally landing off-season work at one of the scores of beachside tourist tchotchke shops, Chambers’ Beach Emporium.

The boss (soap opera veteran Dorothy Lyman, who got a career boost from “Ruby” too) is kind enough to give her work when she’s laid off most of her staff for the winter. But she’s got “one rule” for all her employees.

“Don’t date my son.”

Rochelle (Allison Dean), an employee headed back to school, seconds this warning.

But when “hunk in the trunk” Ricky (Bentley Mitchum) shows up, bats his eyes and comes on to her like he’s entitled to her attention, Ricky’s suggestion is the one Ruby listens to.

“Might as well get it over with.”

Ruby muses about her choices, her life and her future in a journal she starts keeping in the biker-friendly trailer park she moves into. This is the filmmaker’s (a longtime Fla. State film professor) homage to Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” which he has cited as his inspiration.

She came to Panama City because this corner of the Fla. coast — which Floridians call “Florabama” both for its geography and redneckery — was the destination of “the one vacation I remember” as a child when she was 10.

The film follows the repercussions of her affair with Ricky, and the attraction she feels to a plant nursery clerk (Todd Field, who got a nice career bounce out of “Ruby,” and then became a famous director), even if he’s a tad pretentious.

“It’s been a long time since one kiss made my lips hum,” she narrates for her journal.

“Ruby” has an ambling “slow cinema” quality to it long before that term was ever coined. Not a whole lot happens, but what does is parked firmly in one woman’s reality. She job hunts, takes tougher work at a local laundry, but never seems to develop a life plan for herself.

The voice-over narration of her journal entries can feel disconnected from Ruby’s day to day life.

“Wonder if I’ll ever feel just what I am?”

That’s a writerly indulgence of the screenwriter-director.

And with Nunez as my witness, I don’t remember the strip club scene, a prurient staple of 10,000 generic films a lot less interesting than “Ruby in Paradise.”

Judd went on to sparkling career of mostly thrillers (“Heat,””A Time to Kill,””Kiss the Girls”) and more recently TV (“Berlin Station”) and married a famous race car driver.

Nunez’s Florida-centric indie career peaked with “Ulee’s Gold,” which resurrected Peter Fonda and made Florabama Tupelo honey a fascinating backdrop for a seriously conventional thriller.

But for film history buffs, “Ruby in Paradise” is the one most fondly-remembered. It is indie cinema as regional cinema, a post-“sex, lies and videotape” declaration of independence from Hollywood that pointed the way for any filmmaker who didn’t want to travel West and “take meetings” and “notes” all day to get a movie made.

And for generations of actors, Judd’s gamble — find a smart project with a plum role and a filmmaker you believe in — became a model worth emulating and a path to success that has proved itself time and again in the decades since.

MPA Rating: R for some sexuality and language

Cast: Ashley Judd, Todd Field, Allison Dean, Dorothy Lyman and Bentley Mitchum

Credits: Scripted and directed by Victor Nunez, loosely based on Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.” A Quiver re-release.

Running time: 1:56

“A man comes in here at night and tries to kill us?”

Night after night after night.

Brea Grant wrote and stars in this”Won’t somebody believe me?” tale.
A March release from the Shudderers. https://youtu.be/Jqt5AwfSnzk

Somewhere in the bowels of Mousewitz in deepest, darkest Burbank, a Disney executive is streaming Netflix’s “Goonies Lite” kid-pic “Finding ‘Ohana” and weeping into her Hermes clutch.

Take some consolation in the fact that it gets lost in the whole “treasure hunt” hook that sucks up the last half of the movie and makes it drag past two hours if you want. But this is a cute Hawaiian hoot of a comedy, too much “Indiana Jones” is a small price to pay for that.

“Goonies,” “Raiders,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” Keanu Reeves and “Drunk History” were the filmmakers’ reference points and source of running gags. They and a cast of mostly-unknowns brings wit and representation to burn in a movie about Hawaii and Hawaiians, starring a lot of Hawaiians and people of Polynesian descent.

New Yorkers Pili (Kea Peahu), brother Ioane or “E” (Alex Aiono) and nurse-mom Leilani (Kelly Hu of “Nash Bridges) are pulled back to Hawaii because Grandpa Kimo (Branscombe Richmond) is having trouble keeping out of the hospital and keeping up with the old homestead.

Pili has to miss out on geocaching camp, Ioane misses out on New York high school girls and Mom has no clue how much her Dad has fallen behind on…everything. And Kimo? He’s appalled at how little Leilani has taught his grandkids about Hawaii, how to speak and live Hawaiian.

Yes, he peppers his speech with his native tongue, talking about “wailua (spirit) and serving Spam delicacies, leaving the kids a little lost.

At least “E” has lovely local Hana (Lindsay Watson) to unimpress. And thank Lani that geocacher Pili finds an old pirate’s journal that her Grandpa has been studying for years.

All she needs is a walking encyclopedia, pale and named “Casper,” redheaded and nicknamed “Ginger Stark” by Pili’s brother, to help her solve the puzzle and find a lost treasure.

“Drunk History” kicks in with some amusing Pili-translated/narrated scenes of the pirates’ history — acted out in flashbacks starring Mark Evan Jackson, Ricky Garcia and Chris Parnell.

“Keanu” comes into play as the name of Casper’s too-handy walking stick, and in E’s irritation at trying to get New Yorkers to learn his name. “Keanu” is the “only Hawaiian name anybody knows. And he’s the WORST.”

“Keanu’s a HAWAIIAN TREASURE,” Hana shouts back. “The sadness just makes him...hotter!“

I love the inclusion of bits of Hawaiian myth (“Nightmarchers”), traditions and scenery. A visit to the scenic Kualoa Ranch Nature Preserve, a favorite filming location (“Jurassic Park,” a TV series or three) sets up a “Who comes all the way to Hawaii to see where they filmed ‘Lost?'” bit, an evisceration that only an island-dwelling nerd could deliver.

Young Miss Peahu may hit her Brooklynese a tad too hard, but she’s got spunk and screen presence. Youtube singer and actor Aiono is amusingly clutzy, and none of the cast lets the side down.

The “Goonies/Indiana Jones” cave stuff is pro forma, a real paint-by-numbers job. And it goes on for far too long. But there are jokes between the pre-ordained obstacles (spiders, cave-ins), and even a Meghan Trainor sing-along, to break up the recycling.

And as overlong as this is, in the end, here’s a final tip that contradicts that. Stay through the credits.

MPA Rating: PG, a little profanity, a smidgen of peril

Cast: Kea Peahu, Alex Aiono, Lindsay Watson, Branscombe Richmond, Owen Vaccaro, Kelly Hu and Chris Parnell

Credits: Directed by Jude Weng, script by  Christina Strain. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

Rarely have still photos from a film so perfectly captured that indie horror thriller so well that a review seems redundant.

“Dead Air” is as dazzling, chilling and spine-tingling as the two photos posted above.

Get the picture?

A “Frequency” story of HAM radio conversations traveling through time, it is tedium itself — deathly dull.

Scene after scene of bland, “therapeutic” chats between a guy (director Kevin Hicks) trying out his dad’s old HAM set, and an older woman (screenwriter Vickie Hicks) who goes by “Melder Girl.”

“Melder” is German for “reports,” by the way.

As Will is in 1984, and this “Ava” “Melder Girl” is using the occasional archaic English term, has never heard of “agoraphobia” or “shrinks,” well — see where this is going?

All these conversations, some of them “drunk,” with two dullards who aren’t even amusing drunks, can’t hide their long-delayed final destination from us.

I’m talking about the characters. But as they’re played by the pair who wrote and directed this, they might take that personally. Go nuts, kids.

This story, as it crawls ever-so-slowly towards its mysterious “AHA,” interrupts the sleep-inducing radio chats with Will’s visits to a psychotherapist (Chris Xaver) where he undergoes hypnosis in an effort to regain lost memories.

He goes under. We go under watching him go under.

Unwatchable.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Kevin Hicks, Vickie Hicks, Chris Xaver

Credits: Directed by Kevin Hicks. Script by Vickie Hicks. A Chinimble release.

Running time: 1:30

Sure, you’ve seen those TV ads starring this or that “ex-addict” now running a tony drug rehabilitation facility. Maybe you’ve seen news stories on addiction and rehab for fun and profit. Perhaps you caught the documentary American Relapse” from a couple of years back and you remember what “junkie hunters” are.

Here’s a feature film set in that unsavory “system,” a reminder that the opioid manufacturers and marketers, and the doctors who prescribed America into it’s “other” epidemic, aren’t the only ones making bank from our appetite for self-destruction.

“Body Brokers” is a drama set against that reporting, a film about good intentions twisted, raped and pillaged by the predatory. It’s about the Afford Care Act’s inclusion of drug rehab provisions, something meant to help deal with an already rampant opioid abuse crisis. And it’s about those who figured out how to game that system — get rich quick rehab owners, junkies paid to go into rehab, the “hunters” who recruit and pay off those addicts — and a world of good intentions, and government and insurance industry cash, flushed down the drain.

Writer-director John Swab (“Run With the Hunted”) delivers a B-movie with few surprises but plenty of good, solid punches at a mess that didn’t fix a problem, it just allowed a fresh field of predators to profit from it.

Utah and Opal are in masks when we first meet them, knocking over a Columbus, Ohio convenience store. She (Alice Englert of “Ginger & Rosa,” “Beautiful Creatures”) is the scarier of the two, the one who does most of the threatening, the one most eager to shoot up after the stick-up.

Utah (Jack Kilmer of “Palo Alto,” “Summer ’03,””The Nice Guys”) is just as addicted, but more along for the ride. That’s why he’s the one who listens when they’re offered a meal by the stranger they bum a cigarette from.

Wood, played with a streetwise charm by Michael Kenneth Williams (“The Wire,” “Red Sea Diving Resort,” “Lovecraft Country”), isn’t from some “church.” No, he’s not about charity. But he’s got a business card and a suggestion.

“Don’t wait to start the rest of your life.”

His promise of brokered rehab in California doesn’t distract Opal. But Utah has never seen the ocean. He doesn’t hear the cynical voice-over narration, a blizzard of numbers about start-up rehab centers. tens of thousands of “beds to fill,” and the money everybody on the consumer end of drug abuse can pick up just for offering to go and get clean.

New West Recovery has a kindly, supportive receptionist/nurse (Jennifer Rothe), group therapy and counseling from Dr. White (Oscar winner Melissa Leo) and hope.

“Just keep doing the right thing,” Wood urges, after checking in Utah. “One day at a time!”

Even people with little knowledge of three-act dramatic structure can smell where this is going. Yes, there’s good work going on inside those walls. Yes, somebody “else” is paying for it. And yes, a system set up life that is ripe for corruption.

So we’ll be served a first act of hope, a second act of success, and eye-opening revelations, and a third act when the corruption comes home to roost and the whole rotten system is exposed as the zero-sum game it has been twisted into.

Swab’s formulaic script allows the mind to drift just enough to weight the net value of such a system — SOME people are getting clean, getting better and getting out — before disabusing us of any notion about the odds working in society’s favor.

That’s the job of our testy, winking narrator, who happens to be the guy who set up New West just like a dozen other ex-addicts running rehab resorts we see advertised on TV. He happens to be played by the wonderful character actor Frank Grillo (“Hell on the Border,” “Point Blank,”TV’s “Kingdom” and “Billions”).

Vin has the comforting, “speaks your language” sales pitch of a fellow ex-addict, perfect for pep talks with every new group in his facility. But to his staff, to “foot soldier” junkie hunters/recruiters like Wood, he’s all about “keeping the beds filled and the money rolling in.”

Grillo’s Vin narrates the staggering numbers, the insane profits with plenty of room for payoffs, bribes and skimming, generated by this Rehab Industrial Complex.

The two main heavies — Vin and Wood — use the same words, “Do the math.” Vin is the one who narrates the car repair shop “thrive on repeat business” analogy. “Don’t do a good enough job” rehabilitating an addict, “they don’t come back. Do too GOOD of a job, they don’t come back either.

All the good intentions, the empathetic work of the women like May (Rothe) and Dr. White is for naught if their patients don’t have a support system, don’t join a twelve step group and listen to Wood’s offers of cash and sympathy — “You ready to come back, yet?”

Kilmer doesn’t give us much here that shows he’s a bit player ready to be a leading man. He seems to shrink in almost every scene he’s paired up with somebody else in, almost understandable considering most of his scenes are with Williams, Grillo, Rothe and Leo.

The predictable turns in the story have us a couple of steps ahead of the game, pretty much form the start. And any film built on narration this certain of its “answers” invites scrutiny and questioning its own agenda.

“Body Brokers” still manages to be a generally compelling, always-damning indictment of a system that is supposed to help, costs a fortune, and probably isn’t helping nearly as many as it should.

MPA Rating: R for strong drug content, pervasive language and some sexual content

Cast: Jack Kilmer, Kenneth Michael Williams, Frank Grillo, Alice Englert, Melissa Leo and Jessica Rothe

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jack Swab. A Voltage film, Vertical release.

Running time: 1:51

An early contender for the year’s worst title, this March 8 features Sean Young and Ed Asner in supporting roles.

Kids movies like “Flora & Ulysses” make you appreciate the acting profession.

A talented, accomplished cast can be signed on to an effects-driven picture aimed at a very young audience. But the thing that makes them act the daylights out of it, “sell” this silly concept, is professionalism, committing to the job and by force of will, making us buy in or at least have a laugh to three.

Alyson Hannigan (“How I Met Your Mother”), Ben Schwartz (“Sonic the Hedgehog”), Anna Deveare Smith (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”), Danny Pudi (“Community”), Bobby Moynihan (“Saturday Night Live”) and Kate Micucci (Big Bang Theory”) are pros who give this version of the Kate DiCamillo novel their all. And if they can’t make it come off on their own, they come darned close.

Because heaven help me, I laughed a few times at this herky jerky not-that-quirky adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s hit kid-lit novel.

The story is a Marvel Meets Mehitabel mashup, a tale of a squirrel whose access to a keyboard lets his squirrel’s-eye-view “poetry” come out into the world. The much-honored novelist borrowed ee cummings’ “Archie & Mehitabel” gimmick of critter-typewritten poetry and married it to America’s obsession with superhero comics and won her second Newbery Medal (“Because of Winn-Dixie” won the other) for the idea.

Disney owns Marvel and has the bank account to make a squirrel, sucked into a robot vacuum and thus given super powers, come to the screen. The digital-animated squirrel isn’t exactly lifelike, or even based on one native to North America. The hairy, pointy ears suggest he’s a Eurasian Red Squirrel, but no matter. All he’s got to do is fly like a superhero and as Deadpool reminds us, “stick the (superhero) landing.”

Matilda Lawler plays Flora, a comic-obsessed 10-year-old whose Dad’s comic, Incandesto, never caught on.

That failure sent her family into a stress-induced divorce spiral. Dad (Schwartz) moved out and works at an office supply warehouse store. Mom (Hannigan) is a romance novelist who “wrote about love because she had love,” but who has lost her romance and developed writer’s block.

Flora’s comic-book fueled belief that “miraculous things happen” has curdled into cynicism.

And then that robotic yard vac — Ulysses is the brand name — sucks a squirrel into its innards and Flora has to save him. CPR doesn’t work, so mouth-to-mouth it is.

Squirrel breath? Pretty much what you’d expect. “Fuzzy, damp and kinda nutty.”

Flora becomes convinced this illegal pet was put in her care for a reason, that he has super-powers. All he has to do is log-on to prove it.

The screenwriter has “Wild Hogs” and “Yogi Bear,” “Spies in Disguise” and “Ferdinand” in his credits, so there’s a lot of slapstick mixed in with the comic book jokes and temporarily-blind neighbor kid (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) gags.

Flora’s imaginary companion — Dad’s Incandesto character — is an afterthought the movie doesn’t need. But every time the squirrel “sticks the landing” I chuckled. When Flora narrates “There’s always that moment in any ‘origin story,'” I had to giggle. When the blind kid, perhaps making a point about the value of the “poetry,” shows up with a collection of Rilke poetry, I cackled.

How’s even a temporarily-blind 10-year-old know Rilke, or even know he’s handing off the right book?

Digital squirrel trashing a donut shop? Kind of funny. Kate Micucci playing the waitress? Almost. Danny Pudi as a demoted animal control officer hellbent on catching that “rabid” squirrel? Not funny enough.

Even the “life affirming” squirrel poetry, a real selling point because it worked so well for the writer DiCamillo stole the idea from, is just shy of getting the job done.

“I love your round head,” Ulysses types. “The brilliant green, the sky so new. These letters, this world. You…I am very hungry.”

DiCamillo’s messaging feels shoehorned into all this rather than an integral element of the story, a common complaint in adaptations of her work. “Turns out,” sad Flora narrates, “the hardest thing about having hope is watching the people who don’t.”

Maybe her books aren’t particularly adaptable. Anybody remember “The Tales of Despereaux?” The movie, I mean?

Maybe this screenwriter and this second-time director (she did “The Tiger Hunter”) weren’t the right people to weave profundity and sadness in with animated squirrel slapstick.

The actors may give their all and the squirrel might indeed “stick the landing.” “Flora & Ulysses” still falls a little short of the mark.

MPA Rating: PG

Cast: Matilda Lawler,  Alyson Hannigan, Ben Schwartz, Danny Pudi, Anna Deveare Smith, Bobby Moynihan and Kate Micucci

Credits: Directed by Lena Khan, script by Brad Copeland, based on the Kate DiCamillo novel. A Walt Disney/Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:30