Producers: Cameron Burns, Aaron B. Koontz, Marc Senter and Ashleigh Snead   Director: Lucky McKee   Screenplay: Joel Veach   Cast: Stephen Lang, Marc Senter, Patch Darragh and Liana Wright-Mark   Distributor: RLJE Films

Grade: C-

Now seventy, Stephen Lang has enjoyed a long and varied career on film, stage and television, but has never become a household name.  Younger viewers will recognize him as the blind man in the “Don’t Breathe” movies, and as the evil security chief in “Avatar,” a role he’s repeating in the upcoming sequels.  Others may remember him for his performance as General Stonewall Jackson in the monumental (if bloated) “Gods and Generals.”

In “Old Man,” Lang gets what’s mostly eluded him in the past—the lead role, and indeed one that dominates what’s essentially a two-character piece.  And he proves more than capable of holding your attention for ninety minutes or so, from first frame to last.  But that’s due more to his ability to inhabit an eccentric character than to the material provided him by scripter Joel Veach.

Lang’s old man is a curmudgeon inhabiting a remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains.  First seen sprawled in bed wearing red long johns, he suddenly awakens and calls out to his dog Rascal, who’s apparently run off.  He rages at the missing canine until there’s a knock at the door, which he answers only after grabbing his shotgun.  Throwing the door open, he finds Joe (Marc Senter), a frightened young man who claims to have gotten lost hiking and spied the smoke from the cabin’s chimney; he’s looking for help.

The old man is hardly welcoming, suspecting that the stranger, though soft-spoken and well-mannered, might be a psycho killer—or somebody sent by his wife to find him.  He alternately threatens and ridicules him, but the two warily reach an understanding, though one darkened by the old man’s penchant for telling stories like one about how he tortured a Bible salesman (Patch Darragh) who’d knocked at his door.  Joe is understandably concerned that the man might have similar plans of him.

At the same time, the old man’s suspicions about Joe aren’t unjustified.  The interloper isn’t merely nervous.  He’s holding things back, only revealing his past in bits and pieces.  Or perhaps he only remembers in bits and pieces.

Lang plays this out with an intensity that can shift from menace to rustic amiability with no problem, and Senter’s stiffness and hesitancy fit Joe’s predicament.  The single set—rather like a cluttered stage scene—has been contrived skillfully by production designer Lili Teplan, and director Lucky McKee, cinematographer Alex Vendler and editor Zach Passero work diligently to keep the intimate action from becoming static, keeping the actors moving and the camera roving to maintain interest.

Yet the film is essentially an extended conversation, and Veach hasn’t come up with dialogue worthy of the effort Lang, in particular, puts into it.  The script aims for the sort of propulsive rhythm and tennis-court-style back-and-forth that David Mamet, for one, mastered. But mostly it comes across as repetitive, with Joe simply restating what the old man has just said as a question, so that a response can then carry things forward.  This gets tiresome quickly, allowing tedium to replace tension.

Of course, all the words point toward a destination, which is intended to be surprising but will have been figured out by most viewers long before it arrives.  The mysteries the screenplay establishes in the early going simply turn out to be not so mysterious after all, and the way the explanation is realized is more pretentious than provocative.

So while it’s nice that Lang was allowed to take the wheel for a change, it’s a pity the vehicle he’s driving wheezes along the way and sputters to a stop. 

Producers: Hans Canosa, Kelsey Law, Brian Keady and Gabrielle Zevin   Director: Hans Canosa   Screenplay: Gabrielle Zevin   Cast: Kunal Nayyar, Lucy Hale, Christina Hendricks, Blaire Brown, Lauren Stamile, Charlotte Thanh Theresin, Jordyn McIntosh, Lizzy Brooks, Joe Penczak, David Arquette and Scott Foley   Distributor: Vertical Entertainment

Grade: C-

What works on the printed page can’t always be replicated on screen, a lesson that’s made evident by this tale of a morose widowed bookseller whose passion for life is resurrected when he adopts a toddler who’s been abandoned in his shop and finds romance with a young, charming publisher’s representative. That scenario would suffice for most movies, but “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” is as cluttered with characters and subplots as Fikry’s store is with piles of books.

Fikry (Kunal Nayyar) is introduced as an irascible, sarcastic fellow whose store on Alice Island, off the Massachusetts coast, has gone to seed after the death of his wife.  He treats potential customers with disdain, and is surly and dismissive toward Amy (Lucy Hale), the rep who travels from the mainland to pitch a memoir in which an old man reminisces about his marriage after his wife’s death.  After shooing her and the browsers away, he retreats home for the evening, takes a few bites from what appears to be an unappetizing TV dinner, gets drunk, and falls blearily asleep while gazing at his one true treasure—a first edition copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane”—which he intends to sell, retiring on the proceeds.

But when he awakens the book is gone, and soon after he finds the child, a girl named Maya, on the floor of his shop.  Both matters take him to the police, whose chief Lambiase (David Arquette), a likably laid-back fellow, can do little about either.  Since everybody in town knew about the book and there are no clues as to who took it, its recovery is unlikely.  And since it will take time for authorities from the mainland to get to the island to take charge of Maya, Fikry volunteers to mind her for a few days.

That turns into a permanent state of affairs, of course, and one element of the turgid narrative is to watch the toddler (Charlotte Thanh Theresin) grow into a perky kid (Jordyn McIntosh) and then a teen (Blaire Brown) who writes stories about where she might have come from.  The question of her paternity eventually proves to involve Fikry’s sister-in-law Ismay (Christine Hendricks), her novelist husband Daniel (Scott Foley) and a college student (Lizzy Brooks).  And it turns out to be connected to the theft of the Poe volume too.

Meanwhile, the emotionally revived Fikry enters into a prolonged will-they-or-won’t-they romantic dance with Amy, a long-distance relationship that’s both implausible and inevitable.  The result is a “new family” drama that’s meant to be sweet but comes off as sappy instead. A strange blast from the past pops up after the threesome of Fikry, Amy and Maya is well established, when Fikry invites Leon Friedman (Joe Penczak), the author of that old-man memoir that led Amy to come to the shop in the first place, to travel to the island for a book reading.  That sparks a revelation about one of the attendees (Lauren Stamile) that’s apparently meant to say something profound about art and life, or destiny and coincidence, but proves to be merely baffling.

The central problem with the film is that in rethinking her novel for the screen, Gabrielle Zevin has failed to do the work of pruning and streamlining that a successful adaptation demands; the screenplay is simply overstuffed and ill-constructed.  But it’s also clumsily realized.  Hans Canosa’s direction lacks precision and energy, and Jason Nicholson’s editing allows things to simply stumble from scene to scene.  Alex Vendler’s cinematography and Lili Teplan’s production design make little of the setting, while Jeff Eden Fair’s score is emotionally bland.

It’s predictable, then, that the cast seems stranded.  Nayyar tries to invest Fikry with some depth, but despite the changes it undergoes the character remains shallow and unfocused.  The others follow the languid beats of the script without adding much to them; it speaks volumes that Arquette’s cop is practically indistinguishable from the one he played in the “Scream” franchise.  Not even the three girls playing Maya make much of an impression.

So what was intended as a heartwarming tale of loss and love emerges as a shapeless misfire.