This critic does not like to make references to his own reviews. In fact, he’s even allergic to describing himself in the first person. But there are circumstances that require breaking form, and just six weeks ago, in a review for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I contemplated the next possible phase in Michael Keaton’s recent history of revisiting roles from his past. “What’s next, a Mr. Mom reboot?” I wrote. “Grandpa Mom, maybe?”

I had not actually looked ahead to Keaton’s upcoming release schedule at the time I wrote that, but this was, indeed, sort of what was next. In Goodrich, Keaton plays the father of three children separated by a generation: 30-something Grace (Mila Kunis), the product of his first marriage, and nine-year-old twins Billie and Mose (Vivien Lyra Blair and Jacob Kopera), the children he had with his current much younger wife, Naomi (Laura Benanti). When she goes into rehab to face a pill addiction, he’s left with the household parenting duties that usually fall to her – and wants to enlist Grace to help him, even though she’s entering her third trimester. That’s right, he’s about to become an actual Grandpa Mom.

Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s film does not lean into those domestic chores the way an actual Mr. Mom reboot would, opting for a more complete portrait of where Andy Goodrich finds himself during this phase of undeniable transition, which also features the possible loss of his art gallery due to financial troubles. And though that portrait loses some of its distinctiveness in the film’s second half, it starts with a bang with that concept, and remains engaging and likeable throughout.

Andy Goodrich has been so invested in his career that he has failed to notice the little things, some of which are very important things. One important thing, for example, is the fact that his son has a nut allergy, something he surely knew but fails to consider when it’s actually left to him to conjure a family dinner of takeout Chinese. Then there’s the reality that was plain as day even to those children – that their mother was unhappy and had been abusing prescription medication – that has thus far escaped his detection. This is to say nothing of a lifetime of neglect toward his older daughter, who lost out to the gallery and the related travel for her entire childhood.

Andy’s got amends to make every which way he looks, though it does not sound like Naomi will be very receptive. In the same phone call where she informs him where she is and where she will be for the next 90 days, she also tells him she’s leaving him. This is just the first of many seismic shifts in Andy’s life, such as the desperate last attempt to save his gallery by courting the daughter (Carmen Ejogo) of a recently deceased artist to see if she’ll let him show her mother’s paintings. Getting the kids to school on time and remembering to pack their favourite chocolate chip cookies is the least of his worries.

Goodrich radiates human warmth. Not all the films of Keaton’s comeback period have showcased his knack for gaining audience sympathy, but Goodrich makes up for the deficit. The actor has a quicksilver charisma that allows him to smile and make a joke to disguise the pain hiding just behind his eyes, and Keaton uses these tools to maximum effect here. Of course, much of Andy’s pain is self-inflicted, as he’s now paying for a lifetime of low-level disengagement, right when his soul needs the most nourishing from those who love him.

Meyers-Shyer packs the cast with actors who can get the most out of their gentle butting heads with Andy. Of particular note is the precocious Vivien Lyra Blair as Billie, who gets some of the best lines in Meyers-Shyer’s script, and has the comedic delivery to make the most of them. She’s a clever reminder of how perceptive today’s children are, as she puts her theoretically older and wiser dad in his place with just a few withering remarks.

Then there’s a delightful turn from Michael Urie as the gay father of one of the twins’ epileptic classmates, who provides a great form of buddy therapy with Andy before that relationship takes something of a dispiriting conventional turn. And if “gay father of an epileptic classmate” sounds like piling on the topical traits, it doesn’t play that way. It’s just a sign of the movie’s understanding that families don’t profile as simply as they once did, which Andy’s family also embodies.

If there’s a weaker spot in the cast, it’s probably Mila Kunis, though the fault lies largely with the conception of the character she is required to play. The script yanks around her character between comedic resentment, actual resentment and a sort of benevolence that defies both of those things, such that you can’t get a grip on where she is at any point in the narrative. This is underscored by the resolution of her character’s arc, which perhaps typifies the movie’s diminishing returns as it goes along.

But if Goodrich diminishes as it goes, it’s only dropping a notch from great to merely very good. The opening of this film is so tight, so smartly drawn and so funny that there is probably nowhere to go but down. The movie brings your emotions close to the surface near the beginning, in part as an imagination of where things might go, in part as a snapshot of where they already are, and in part because you really sense how much the writer-director loves these characters, foibles and all. That she doesn’t stick the landing in her sophomore directing effort isn’t a fatal flaw, especially since the aircraft reached such great heights before then.

 

Goodrich opens today in cinemas.