Movie Nation

Gina Gershon, as the empress of MMA fight promoters, and Elijah Baker as a desperate personal manager to a fighter needing a comeback are the two performers who merit the label “actors” in “Cagefighter: Worlds Collide,” a stupidly-plotted collection of gimmicks from several lesser “Rocky” movies reset in the Octagon.

I point these two out because the other “performances” have a hint of boxing/wrestling/MMA “hype” authenticity, even if we never believe the brawlers playing the parts are thinking of these lines, or delivering them with spontaneity.

It’s all about the fights, of course, so quibbling about stiff line-readings, starchy staging and stale leave-the-awkward-pauses-in direction and editing is just an invitation to assault.

But these mugs can’t act. Even the ring announcers need coaching. Not that the script helps.

“I don’t think a single person in this arena saw that coming!”

The three-act structure writer-director and MMA movie specialist Jesse Quinones came up with? Three. Fights. Plus a snippet of one in the opening credits.

I don’t think a single person watching this movie saw that coming.

The hero, Brit light middleweight Reiss Gibbons (Alex Montagnani) is a five-time champ who has “cleaned out his division,” causing promoter Max (veteran character vixen Gershon) to talk him into a title defense with a psycho, trash-talking wrestler, Randy Stone (Jon Moxley).

I don’t follow the sport closely, but it does have a hint of “We’re making up this showbiz s— as we go along” in its reputation.

Reiss hears the pay per view numbers, and takes the bait.

“What’s Reiss got to lose?” “His DIGNITY!”

Stone? Don’t mention “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. It’s on the list of things that will set him off.

“These are BRICKS,” he yells, holding up his fists. “These are MACK trucks!”

He’s just getting started. “I’m stronger than him, I’m bigger than him, I’m QUICKER than him, Hell, I’m better LOOKING than him!”

We’ve heard that before, variations on a boxing/wrestling/MMA theme, quoting from the Tao of Muhammad Ali.

The build up — exchanging blows when they first meet, another near-brawl at a press conference, delivers the inevitable. The “champ” is humiliated.

It’s the beginning of a downward spiral the screenplay just prances through with no more thought than “I’m afraid.”

There’s nothing for it but to go back to the “basics,” and as Burgess Meredith is long dead and gone, so MMA big name Chuck Liddell plays Marcus, the trainer and nobody’s idea of a thespian, will have to do.

Moxley is the better actor of the ring performers, to be fair. Not that there’s much more that really brutal fight choreography to master.

And even if the acting was better, it’s hard to see this script as anything more than perfunctory scenes in between the fights.

“Wait, I’m BROKE? ‘Ow can that BE, mate?”

It’s a movie, so it’s more violent than any MMA fight you’ve ever seen. So maybe fans will get something out of it. But I don’t see Scorsese or any of his proteges lining to tell a story in the octagon any time soon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, blood and profanity

Cast: Alex Montagnani, Jon Moxley (Jonathan Good), Chuck Liddell, Elijah Baker, Georgia Bradner and Gina Gershon.

Credits: Written and directed by Jesse Quinones. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:38

It’s not utter madness to reset American novelist Jack London’s overtly political novel “Martin Eden” in the Red Epoch Italy of the 1960s.

The title character (Luca Marinelli of TV’s “Trust”) rants about “individualism” and “socialism” and “capitalism” as a young man teaching himself literature, politics and how to write. He adds fame to his rage repertoire in his later years, a famous poet, novelist and essayist who no longer speaks at union rallies and fumes guiltily about that.

The ferment of the time, with liberal capitalists kidding themselves about how much they hate the very idea of socialism, gives the adaptation an appropriate backdrop, if nothing else.

But this meandering Pietro Marcello (“Lost and Beautiful”) film seems to exist out of time, a fictional “struggling artist” biography as rife with cliches as it is obtuse in story and message.

Martin is a merchant sailor when we meet him, young and curious about the world beyond his reach. He’s head-turning handsome, hotheaded and two-fisted. But he recognizes the dead-end that being stuck in his circumstances promises him. And he resolves to change that by becoming an autodidact. He will teach himself.

Martin’s first break comes when he intervenes in a beating a rich kid is taking. That introduces him into the world of the cultured and well-off Orsinis, and fair Elena (Jessica Cressy) becomes his Unattainable. She speaks French, plays the piano and is as well-read and cultured as any college student he’ll ever meet.

“Mr. Eden,” she says, keeping him at a formal remove for the longest time, “what you need is an education. I can see you’ve got intelligence.”

Martin strives to educate himself, and writes her letters from his various gigs on “my incessant march through knowledge (in Italian with English subtitles).” One more menial job and he vows to make a living by writing, turning out short stories and essays which every newspaper and magazine in Italy turns down. “Return to sender” packages are even more brutal than rejection notes.

He gives himself “two years to prove my talent” can support them, but gets sidetracked in his readings. He takes to the long-abandoned philosopher and social theorist Herbert Spencer, the man who read Darwin and coined the phrase “Survival of the fittest,” which he applied to every sort of transaction and interaction.

Martin throws Spencer into every argument, which makes him no friends even as his writing finally gains notice.

The cliches raining all over this lengthy and often tediously-talky affair include choosing the aspirational mate over the beauty of his own class, the mentor (Carlo Cecchi) who challenges him not to sell out and the tubercular hanky that mentor is sure to cough into at some point.

The TB and incredibly tin-eared Spencer obsession are among the dated elements of this good-looking, artfully-made drama. Marcello inserts early 20th century silent film footage clips to make the connection between the ferment London (and Martin Eden) write in, and the script takes pains to include a loud, pontificating debate between smug members of the Orsini circle and Martin, whose tolerance of socialism (if not his embrace of it) they dismiss as “one of the maladies of youth.”

Marinelli is never less than committed to this “primitive” artist character, a guy not shy about throwing a punch and treating women as prizes, setting his jaw at being reminded of how poorly-educated he is and how his success may be the ultimate revenge, even if the end, that’s not enough.

Nor is “Martin Eden.” This high-minded London story is far closer to the leftist/workers-unite allegories of the German socialist/novelist B. Traven. But even Traven took care to wrap his politics and striving/struggling characters in entertaining adventure parables like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

London, already famous and well-off thanks to his early 1900s hits “Call of the Wild,” “White Fang” and “The Sea Wolf,” worked out his dissatisfaction with himself and his relationship with the world with “Martin Eden.” But in English or in Italian, that was never going to be particularly cinematic, something the filmmakers here must have realized when they gave up on editing this into something more coherent and entertaining.

Cast: Luca Marinelli, Jessica Cressy, Carlo Cecchi and Denise Sardisco

Credits: Pietro Marcello script by Pietro Marcello and Maurizio Braucci , based on a novel by Jack London. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 2:09

What a bizarre, loopy and over-the-top environmental justice drama “The Devil has a Name” is.

It’s pitched like a fable, with vampy, larger-than-life villainy, outragous, out-in-the-open crimes and intimidation, a plucky “little man” hero and a crusading lawyer who has reached the bladder control years of his practice.

“Inspired by a true story,” it’s as much a cause as a movie, which drew Edward James Olmos to it. He directs and co-stars in this story of a Bakersfield area almond grower at war with the Big Oil company that poisoned his groves and his life.

Olmos is on safe ground — well, safer ground — when he confines his story to the widowed grower (David Strathairn), his farm manager/pal (Olmos) and their rising alarm at what’s happening to their trees. Even the time we spend with the hard-drinking oil woman (Kate Bosworth) who sips from her flask’s cup (ladylike) while exchanging testy epithets with her board (Alfred Molina is the venomous chair) is at least entertaining.

“Houston city is WIN city,” Molina’s chairman rages, in between tasteless JFK-killed-in-Texas threats. “MAMA didn’t bring home the W!”

But Shore Oil heiress Gigi (Bosworth) has a good excuse, setting up the tale to be told in flashback.

“There are 53 different kinds of nuts in the world. (Strathairn’s farmer) was one of them.”

That tone is what Olmos tries to sustain throughout the film. But the director/co-star’s attempts at wizened Hispanic whimsy clashes with Strathairn’s widowed dirt-farmer reality. And then this violent, menacing “heavy” from the company (Pablo Schreiber, cartoonishly evil) shows up, and the formerly-famous crusading lawyer (Martin Sheen) who takes on the case.

“The Devil Has a Name” stops staggering down that fine line between thriller and spoof and takes a header straight into the ditch.

The long flashback here is about how that farmer, Fred Stern (Strathairn), a grieving widower who never got to buy a boat and sail the world with his late wife, decides to take on Shore Oil, which uses a local “farmboy turned advertising hack” (Haley Joel Osment, over-acting as if there was a gun to his head) to lowball him into selling his land.

We follow two points of view. Fred an his friend and farm manager Santiago’s comically quarrelsome (wrestling, even) relationship and Fred’s decision to go to court, and the glowering drunk Gigi staring down her board and Molina.

Fred’s annoyance turns into storm-out-of-the-shower outrage in a flash. Big Oil escalates matters into intimidation and threats in a bigger flash.

The elderly lawyer asks for a bathroom break.

“I will NOT have grandstanding in my courtroom,” the judge bellows. The trial is nothing but grandstanding and eye-rolling double-crosses.

And none of it adds up to anything with urgency about it, a sense of triumph or defeat or a story coherent enough to engage the viewer.

“Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation,” Dr. Albert Schweitzer said. He wasn’t a critic complaining about a movie. But he could have been.

MPAA Rating: R (Some Sexual Material|Brief Violence|Language|Drug Use)

Cast: David Strathairn, Kate Bosworth, Edward James Olmos, Pablo Schreiber, Haley Joel Osment, Katie Aselton and Alfred Molina.

Credits: Edward James Olmos, script by Robert McEveety. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:37

For film buffs, the short and acidic 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear” is more fun for the argument it sets up than the 68 minutes presented on the screen.

Orson Welles helped script it, took a beefy supporting role — as a head of pre-WWII Turkish intelligence — put many of his repertory company in it, including his then-girlfriend, the exotic Dolores del Rio, and thought of directing it at one point.

On the radio or on the screen, the man loved thriller novelist Eric Ambler.

But journeyman director Norman Foster, known for “Mr. Moto” serials and not a lot else, came on to run the set and made the trains run on time for RKO’s “wunderkind.” The result is a sort of dry run for Carol Reed’s later “The Third Man,” an atmospheric European mystery built around Joseph Cotten, as an American hounded by the corruption and intrigues of the Old World, with Welles in a scene-devouring supporting role.

Seeing “Fear” again recently, the academic consensus arrived at in recent years — that Welles directed or “suggested” direction for the scenes he was in, and didn’t take much interest in the rest — seems the generous way to look at it.

He was an imposing performer, and several films he appeared in give the sense that he’s taken over behind the camera as well, at least for a bit. Here, his booming baritone and height so tower over his scenes that “Journey” becomes a film about Col. Haki in the opening, and the finale.

But this story of a ballistics expert (Cotten) menaced and chased across the Eastern Mediterranean, tempted (sort of) by a femme fatale (del Rio), is least interesting when it is literally at sea — the middle acts. The plot is a trifle confusing, and probably was more so before studio mandated cuts and adding a narration.

Col. Haki’s presence livens up the opening, and the murderous finale is like a Welles version of Reed’s later “Third Man” chases and suspense — shadows, rain, a killer sidling along a balcony after an in-over-his-head hero, Howard Graham (Cotten).

“Ah, you have this advantage over the soldier, Mr. Graham,” Welles’ Haki growls. “You can run away without being a coward.”

Welles knew the strengths of his Mercury company, and parked Ruth Warrick and Agnes Moorhead in decent parts and gave his pint-sized dynamo Everett Sloane a weasel’s presence in the intrigues.

“You might take a shine to Josette! After all, this little girl is very stupid. Of course Josette is stupid too, but she has it!”

“Journey Into Fear” has experienced something of a revival among Welles fans, thanks to a restored (longer, no voice-over narration) “European cut” that runs 76 minutes. It’s a shame most classic film TV distributors haven’t replaced their versions with the Museum of Modern Art cut.

Watching it again recently, I found its interest lies in Welles the performer, much like his turn in Huston’s “Moby Dick,” a film worth seeing for “the good parts,” those being Welles as Col. Haki, and flashes of the leading man Joseph Cotten quickly became after its release.

MPAA Rating: “approved”

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorhead and Orson Welles.

Credits: Directed by Norman Foster (and Orson Welles). Script by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, based on the Eric Ambler novel. An RKO release.

Running time: 1:08

Ach du lieber! Oct. 23 on Netflix.

Few movies grab the lonely, lost and timeless suck of freshman year at college as well as “Shithouse,” the debut feature of writer, director and co-star Cooper Raiff.

It’s a sweet, sensitive and amusing run through what being a freshman a long way from home has always been like and to a large degree remains like in the eternal college experience. I couldn’t get over how “Whoa, it was JUST like that” it was, and kids, I was in college before John Hughes was done telling everybody what high school could be like.

Alex (Raiff) is a nice 19 year-old, a loner-by-default, entirely too nurturing and human to ever wear the label “INCEL,” even by accident.

Maggie (Dylan Gelula of TV’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) is resident advisor in his dorm at a small, unnamed Los Angeles college.

He cries on the phone with his cool, cussing mom (Amy Landecker, warm and wonderful). Alex is also the sort who, when he fellow freshman roomie Sam (Logan Miller of “Before I Fall” and “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) gets drunk — again — tries to help him to the bathroom, limit his vomit to a trash can and always gets cussed out for it.

She’s just a sophomore, not that much older — but wiser, and wholly invested in the whole college hook-up scene.

They know each other from the dorm and stumble into each other at a party Sam has let Alex tag along to, at a frat home everybody calls “the Shithouse.” She doesn’t see him thoughtfully help another drunk into the bathroom ahead of them, but before the night is done, they’ll be together — but not in the ways we expect. And we wonder if they’ll even stay on speaking terms for the entire weekend.

Dude has NO game. Girl has NO luck. Freshman boys aren’t exactly the world’s most generous or accomplished lovers, and Maggie gets a reminder of that a couple of times before the night is through.

The first funny moment? She throws “wanna hang out” and “in my room” at him hours after that party.

“Do you even know my NAME?”

Takes a while to recover from that, but she gets a kick out of offering sage counsel to Mr. “I have no friends.”

“College should be the most selfish time of your life,” she advises, and “If you keep apologizing, THEN you’ll be sorry.”

Their “random” evening includes coming to terms with the fact that her pet turtle’s died and stumbling into a late-night drunken pick-up softball game, where he fast-pitches one right into Maggie’s thigh.

“I have literally never been so sorry in my life”

And then, things take a turn.

One “tell” in this indie dramedy is the fact that the writer-director “star” gives the leading lady most of the best lines. Smart.

There’s a little slapstick, a little drama, a little judging, a few good (not great) lines and a few instances of bad sex in this “Before Sunrise.” It’s occasionally brittle but cute, and more random than “deep.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“On airplanes I do.”

The arc of the story is log but narrow. And its message — that we don’t finish college the same person that we were when we began — is one every college kid should hear and appreciate.

Gelula, a veteran child actress able to summon immature confusion and the sense that Maggie doesn’t have the answers she thinks she does at 19, is terrific. Miller’s Sam is gregarious, clueless and starts out a jerk, but comes to appreciate his computer-chosen roommate’s supportive qualities, suggesting his “jerk” is more a product of alcohol abuse. Yes, he’s an amusing drunk.

And Raiff is a skinny, sensitive cipher, more at home with the emotional moments than the silly ones. The crying is a bit much, and he is playing a “type,” but he holds his own.

He doesn’t reinvent the genre, dazzle with his ear for dialogue or show himself a master technician behind the camera.

But what he does show us is sound judgement and generosity. He cast well and had the good sense to let the more experienced players have the best lines and moments to shine. Whatever his acting future holds, I could certainly see him getting his stories on the screen as a writer-director, even if he isn’t his own leading man, even if he isn’t reliving college experiences — the precious to the cringe-worthy, every time out.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content and drug/alcohol use

Cast: Cooper Raiff, Dylan Gelula, Amy Landecker and Logan Miller

Credits: Written and directed by Cooper Raiff. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:41

Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Common, Ana de Armas and Clive Owen star in this version of the undercover ex con goes back to prison thriller. November.

“Yucatán” is a colorful, cute Spanish con artist comedy set on a cruise ship. But like even the most entertaining cruise vacations, it is stuffed with long, dull passages in between destinations.

Overly complex, and layered with musical production numbers that pad its length, its effect is not unlike devoting too much time to the buffet. “Bloated” comes to mind.

Roberto Clayderman (Rodrigo De la Serna) is the silky-smooth — almost oily lounge — pianist and MC for the entertainment on board the Sovereign, a liner based in Barcelona. He and his lady love, the singer Veronica (Stephanie Cayo) have it pretty good, mostly because he’s enlisted a big chunk of the crew in his schemes to rook the wealthier guests out of cash via a variety of hustles.

Veronica’s in on it, with a role to play in their elaborate “wholesale diamonds” scam, staged at their first port-of-call, Casablanca.

But there’s another hustler on board for this trip. Lucas (Luis Tosar) has broken the covenant — “I work the Atlantic, you stick to the Mediterranean”). He’s snuck on board, play-acting worry and grief, swapping luggage, and busting in on a stage show for a little ukulele crooning.

The movie is about their trip, to Casablanca, Tenerife, to Recife, Brazil and ending in…you guessed it, “Yucatán.”

Roberto will compete with Lucas for Veronica, each trying to foil the other’s con jobs along the way, both of them conspiring — separately — to separate the elderly baker (Joan Pera) from his hovering, gullible and greedy family, and him from his money.

Antonio the baker just won the Spanish lottery.

Co-writer/director Daniel Monzón (“The Biggest Robbery Never Told”) has conjured up a comedy of lush musical production numbers and wacky, over-the-top hustles. These two crooks seem capable of most everything — even tossing somebody overboard (not fatally) when the need arises.

The situations, threats and cons can be amusing. Sometimes. But the dialogue? Not so much.

A couple of helpless tourists fear public displays of sexuality in Casablanca — “Do you want them to STONE us?” That’s it. That’s the sole funny line. Yeah.

The picture never has much comic edge, and goes soft altogether in the later acts.

The Argentine De la Cerna (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) gets the dapper and devilish thing right, and the rough-hewn Tosar (“To Steal from a Thief”) suggests menace far beyond anything his character is actually capable of. Well, hijacking a tour bus on Tenerife is pretty “out there.”

Nobody really charms us, the amusing bits aren’t THAT amusing (homophobic gags and lines), only the Big Cons, the Long Game and the Longer Game laid out here have any hope of letting “Yucatán” leave you with a smile.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drinking, scatological humor

Cast: Luis Tosar, Rodrigo De la Serna, Stephanie Cayo, Joan Pera, Alicia Fernández, Gloria Muñoz, Txell Aixendri, Lupe Cartié Roda

Credits: Directed by Daniel Monzón, script by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Daniel Monzón, A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:11

The cleverest thing about the laugh-every-two-minutes comedy “John Bronco” is that nobody involved tried to stretch this extended sketch of an idea into feature film length.

It’s just 38 minutes of everybody’s favorite vice principal, Walton Goggins, he-man drawling, preening and cussing through a mockumentary about a rodeo cowboy and spokesmodel so butch Ford named the Bronco after him.

Goggins (TV’s “Justified”) is the titular character, and if you learn one thing from John Bronco’s story, it’s the definition of “aptronym.”

Tim Meadows, sporting a cowboy hat and a befuddled look, plays Bronco’s manager, comparing his client’s overly-apt surname to “Jude Law, the judge” or “Orlando Bloom, the florist” or “Brad Pitt, the peach pie guy.”

We’re treated to the moment, a live interview after Bronco has test-driven this unnamed prototype Ford “four wheel drive sportscar” to victory at a Baja road rally, where Bronco goes all “just a country boy in dirty boots, just bustin’ his ass to make a livin'” thing and wins America’s heart.

His first catch phrase? What every good ol’boy wants after a big moment. “Eat some fudge!”

“John Bronco” charts this good ol’boy’s rise — Studio 54 with Sly and uh, David Keith, sitting down with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” going “diva,” and his sudden disappearance.

His biggest celebrity girlfriend? Bo Derek.

“If I’d known he was going to disappear, I never would’ve tried to kill him!”

His most envious celeb pitchmen competitors? Those would be Kareem Abdul Jabbar (goofing on his Nestle’s Crunch commercials of the ’70s) and Fed Ex motormouth John Moschitta Jr.

The whole thing plays like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch-film riff on “Ford v. Ferrari,” supersized and sprinkled with profanity, Goggins modeling assorted hats and boots and cut-off jeans so short they’d make Jessica Simpson blush.

Name-dropping, bad Lee Iaccoca impressions, a worse Tom Brokaw one, an O.J. gag and nostalgia for a beloved off-road vehicle that was never going to be a Jeep, but with the right pitch-man, came close.

“Buy a Bronco, cuz Daddy wants a pony, too!”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Walton Goggins, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Bo Derek, Tim Meadows, narrated by Dennis Quaid.

Credits: Directed by Jake Szymanski, story by Marc Gilbar. A Hulu release.

Running time: :38

Actor turned director Justin Baldoni, best known for TV’s “Jane the Virgin,” has staked out a unique corner of filmdom as his behind-the-camera specialty.

Dude makes weepers. “Five Feet Apart” on the big screen, the doc- series “My Last Days,” and now “Clouds” — Baldoni’s the guy Hollywood turns to when teens are terminal.

“Clouds” is about the Minnesota kid who wrote and recorded a song about being down in the dumps “in this dark and lonely hole,” lamenting that he’ll “never get my chance,” but celebrating that special someone “there with a rope” to pull him out of his funk.

Zach Sobiech and his best friend recorded the song eight years ago, posted it on Youtube, and hundreds of millions of downloads later, he’s no longer with us, but the song is.

The movie is a messy, manipulative affair — about Zach (Fin Argus of TV’s “Total Eclipse”), his BFF Sammy (Disney singer/starlet Sabrina Carpenter of “Girl Meets World”), their songwriting and his osteosarcoma.

That’s the cancer that won’t go away, the one that twenty chemotherapy cycles can’t defeat, which happens in the first act.

Zach’s the chatty, bald kid at Stillwater High, thoughtful, always quick to joke about his illness, ready with a fill-in vamp at the school talent show (“I’m Sexy and I Know It”) when his singing buddy Sammy (Carpenter) gets stage fright.

His three siblings and his parents (Neve Campbell, Tom Everett Scott) try to cope, to wearily tamp down the grief that comes naturally after a struggle that’s drained them all.

“None of us are really promised tomorrow,” Mom offers, “we just sort of assume it.”

That girl (Madison Iseman) Zach’s sweet on at school, the one he had to stand up on their first date because he couldn’t breathe?

“I’m terminal.”

That teacher (Lil Rel Howery) who takes a special interest and has been guiding Zach’s class through their college admissions’ essays, reminding them they’ve got “One life to live, what’re you going to do with it?”

“I’m off chemo.”

“Is it because it worked, or…”

“Or.”

These scenes are touchingly played, with Iseman (“Jumanji”) just breaking your heart with the simple gesture of acting on one’s first instinct — a tearful hug.

The songs are sweetly pleasant folk-rock of the Jason Mraz (“I’m Yours”) variety, whose concert the kids go to early on. There’s also a smattering of Sam Cooke Gospel in the score.

But when I say “messy” and “manipulative,” I’m talking about things that take away from the story’s obvious connection to the heartstrings and the cast’s engagement with that.

The Catholic family tries for Mom’s idea of a Hail Mary — a trip to Lourdes, an immersion in the allegedly blessed “healing” waters.

Arguments erupt out of nowhere. One minute, Zach and Amy are fantasizing about having children together, the next he’s shoving her away. He starts fights over dinner — “Can you NOT look at me that way?”

That’s not unrealistic. Life isn’t always a neatly categorized Kubler-Ross “Five Stages of Grief (death and dying).” Parents try to find uplifting distractions for dying kids, the victim himself is unsure of what to do, to feel, grasping at and lashing out.

When the stakes are terminal, you’re trying to get *bucket list events in or to “leave a mark,” and that’s understandable.

But the film meanders between melodramatic meltdowns and coughing fits, dawdling before it finally gets around to The Song.

And that tune, dominating the third act, leads to every tiresome “Youtube hit” cliche, giving a film that lumbers along one last place to just drag.

Yes, the online success narrative really happened this time. But even the “Your song’s on the radio!” homage to “That Thing You Do” (Tom Everett Scott’s big break) plays flat and deflated here.

Efforts to give the narrative lighter moments feel as artificial and forced as Zach’s blow-ups.

The tears in “Clouds” are built in. But all this manipulation feels excessive, unnecessary padding for a story that needed a vigorous trimming to break your heart and uplift you as it does.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Fin Argus, Sabrina Carpenter, Madison Iseman, Lil Rel Howery, Neve Campbell and Tom Everett Scott

Credits: Directed by Justin Baldoni, script by Kara Holden, based on the book by Laura Sobiech. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 2:01