When we first meet the jerk dad of our loveable protagonist, a stand-in for writer-director Tracie Laymon – the protagonist is the stand-in, not the jerk dad – it’s disappointing to learn his name is Bob Trevino. Laymon’s movie, Bob Trevino Likes It, is named after him, and no cruelly self-involved asshole deserves to have a movie named after him. Especially not if he dismisses his daughter any time he doesn’t need something from her, while she wants nothing from him but companionship and his approval. Even if that does mirror the experience Laymon really had with her own real father.

But wait a moment. Bob Trevino is not the only Bob Trevino in this movie. A second Bob Trevino appears in the form of a stranger online, with whom Lily Trevino forges a connection when she friends him, thinking it’s her father. And given that this second Bob Trevino is given to liking her posts – and a far better father figure to her, even as a stranger – then thank goodness, Laymon’s movie is actually named after him.

These characters are played by the heartbreakingly sympathetic Barbie Ferreira, the reprehensibly manipulative French Stewart and the benevolently genial John Leguizamo. The second of those frequently pushes us to the brink of total disbelief, but fortunately, the other two always bring us back.

Lily’s carrying the scars of her mother becoming a junkie and walking out on them when she was a child, and of her resentful father never allowing Lily to forget her role in that outcome. Of course, Lily’s role was non-existent in any way other than what she represented to her mother, but her father is the sort to use blame as a weapon to get what he wants. He theatrically threatens to sever ties with her if he doesn’t. Isn’t it supposed to be the parent who’s desperate for a child that rejects them, not the other way around?

During one particular schism following a date that goes sideways, where Lily was along to “make Bob look good,” Lily spirals, as she has been doing for much of her adult life. Trying to mend the connection, she reaches out to a Bob Trevino on Facebook who has no photo, so it could be her dad. It’s not, but this Bob lives close enough that they agree to meet, to see if they might be relatives. At which point they form a friendship, with each needing some sort of emotional fulfillment from the other. See, Good Bob was a father for less than two years to a child with a terminal illness, and he and his wife (Rachel Bay Jones) haven’t fully gotten over it, all these years later.

It’s hard to believe there are dads as bad as Lily’s dad, but that’s not because this critic is some naive fool sheltered by a loving upbringing. Rather, it’s hard to believe because the character is written and performed so broadly. Laymon’s script imagines Bad Bob as a figure of unrepentant usury, so blatant in his narcissistic tendencies, and so lacking in the guile to disguise them, that the writer-director has misunderstood these traits can be more effective when underplayed. Stewart was an enjoyable presence in his previously best known role (the TV show Third Rock from the Sun), but he attacked that material with sitcom gusto, and has reined none of it in here. With Lily’s willingness to genuflect to his gaping flaws, it risks the audience finding her one-dimensional in a different manner, and delays our embrace of her.

But just as he did for the person on whom her character was based, Good Bob comes along at just the right time to steer this movie away from its extreme views of human beings, which themselves seem inspired by sitcom logic. For a time, Bob Trevino Likes It is content to live on the level of making Good Bob and Lily the only two sane people in this world, while the others are guilty of everything from behavioural microaggressions to total abdication of parental responsibility. As their connection grows, though, the movie expands to find the others around them much warmer and more capable of love – even if it never gets there with Bad Bob.

On a purely technical level, Bob Trevino Likes It has a middling, not-quite-ready-for-the-cinema quality to it. It’s not that this straightforward story would benefit from all sorts of fancy technique, but neither do we want it to feel like the work of a novice. To be fair, Laymon is something of a novice, having stepped up to feature-length filmmaking for the first time with this project after a number of shorts. It shows enough to occasionally distract us from the prize of its earnest message about found family.

But damn if it doesn’t find its way all the back to that message by the moving denouement. Ferreira is the MVP here, as she has a talent for crying with her whole body and bringing us along on that ride with her. Instead of that being off-putting, as it can be with actors who don’t know what they’re doing, we want to throw our arms around her. Personal details that we know the director brought in from her own life, especially as we get some of the real text messages between Laymon and her Bob before the closing credits, drive this thing to where it needs to go, clearing away our doubts for a clear-eyed conclusion.

And Bad Bob Trevino? Without giving away too much, let’s just say there are some people who really are that selfish and myopic about themselves. That Tracie Laymon had one of those in her life, and turned it into a love letter about the possibilities of the human spirit, is the final victory over the film’s moments of artistic imperfection.

 

Bob Trevino Likes It opened in cinemas yesterday.