Nick Jonas Leads an Awkward Indie Drama

A reserved man with some unresolved childhood issues returns to his hometown for the funeral of a parent. This isn’t only the premise at the heart of Robert Schwartzman’s well-meaning yet timid feature “The Good Half,” but also a recurrent foundation on which many a melancholic American dramedy, from “Elizabethtown” to “Garden State” to “This Is Where I Leave You.”

Pointing out this thematic repetition isn’t necessarily to knock down one of cinema’s favorite topics — after all, familial grief is among the most shared and relatable of human aches. And what are movies, if not an echo of those experiences? But you still go into a film like “The Good Half” hoping that it has something of its own to say on the pains of bereavement. Instead, it just lands like a medley of similar (often, better) films that came before it.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear,” C.S. Lewis wrote in his 1961 book of reflections, “A Grief Observed.” This quote is spelled out nowhere in “The Good Half,” but the story more or less begins on that note of fear. The film starts with the young Renn Wheeland (Mason Cufari) and his idiosyncratic mother Lily (Elisabeth Shue, doing her best in an underwritten part) as she tries to comfort her son, whom she had just forgotten at a shopping mall. In the parking lot, she promises that she will never leave him in a store again. But Renn demands further reassurance. “You’ll never leave me? A hundred percent?,” he anxiously wants to know, unknowingly asking his mom to make a lifelong promise she knows she won’t be able to keep.

Fast-forward to a couple of decades later, and the older Renn (a detached and low-energy Nick Jonas) at long last receives the call that he’s feared his entire life, from his weeping sister: “She’s gone.” As Renn moves his way through the airport to head back home to Cleveland, a series of voicemails effectively inform audiences…