It might come as a surprise that George Clooney has now directed eight features: name more than three and you’re doing quite well. The Tender Bar is one of his better ones lately – a warm-hearted if vaguely inconsequential comedy-drama based on a memoir by the American journalist JR Moehringer, who ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s autobiography and has just been hired to do Prince Harry’s.

A turbulent relationship with an estranged father? It’s not hard to guess what themes from this 2005 book brought Moehringer to the Duke’s attention. Moehringer was raised by a single mother, Dorothy, and spent long stretches of his youth in his grandpa’s ramshackle home with sundry other relatives, forming a particularly close bond with his maternal uncle, Charlie: a plum role for Ben Affleck as a sardonic bartender and fount of all male wisdom.

Icky though this material could have been, one Batman directs another with a sure hand, and Clooney also manages to elicit a touching Tye Sheridan’s best performance in years as the college-age JR. This stands for “junior”: he’s screwed up by being saddled with the same first name as the dad he never gets to see, but whose gravelly voice as a New York radio DJ plagues him continually on the airwaves. 

A salty script by The Departed’s William Monahan is often Clooney’s salvation, and Affleck’s way in. His dispensing of hard-knock advice has a rueful assurance, even when the film’s man-to-man philosophising and literary quips raise serious concerns that someone’s going to start quoting Hemingway. 

There’s an awful lot that shouldn’t work and plenty of things that don’t. Many of the needle-drops, from the likes of Steely Dan and Paul Simon, are an easy pleasure; when you get four of them in the space of 10 minutes, you feel like Clooney’s just buttering you up. Visually, it’s a bit of a nothing. If the chronic establishing shots of Charlie’s Long Island bar (“The Dickens”) transport us anywhere, it’s right back to the comfort zone of Cheers.