Burt Reynolds in The Last Movie Star (A24)

Burt Reynolds stars as Vic Edwards, a very Burt Reynolds–like aging movie star who made some bad career choices and fell hard and fast from the top of the box office in the 1970s. Vic’s life now revolves between the grocery store and his big, empty house, where he chugs bottles of liquor in his recliner.

The same day he has to put his dog down, Vic receives an invitation to a film festival in Nashville to receive a lifetime achievement award, all expenses paid. At the urging of his (friend? agent?) played by Chevy Chase, he hops on a plane and goes. After all, this same festival has given this same prestigious award to Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson. Only when Vic gets to the airport, he finds out he’s not being flown first class. When he lands in Nashville, he’s not greeted with a limousine. And he’s staying at an economy motel. As it turns out, this is not a prestigious film festival after all.

The festival is held in the back of a bar with about 30 people in attendance. They’re going to watch all of Vic’s films back-to-back over the course of the weekend, and they expect the octogenarian to come up to the front and do a Q&A for every single one of them. Talk about a living Hell. So when Vic orders a whiskey neat, he downs it in one gulp in front of the small audience, and asks for another. Over the course of the first film in the marathon, he finishes off an entire bottle of whiskey, and in his second Q&A, he states his opinion: “Cannes was a film festival. This is just a bunch of losers watching movies in their basement.”

The problem at hand is Vic is so out of touch with today’s world of hashtags, Instagram, and slovenly man-children hipsters that he doesn’t realize these kinds of events are where the industry has gone; it’s become less about glamor and more about just the love of movies and getting together with like-minded people. So there’s one lesson anyone with half a brain will figure out before Vic does. Now we just have to spend the remainder of the film watching him get there.

The next morning, Vic demands to be taken back to the airport. On the way there, passing a sign for Knoxville, he tells his driver to take the exit. His driver and personal escort for the duration of the festival is Lil, played by Modern Family’s Ariel Winter, adorned with fake tattoos, piercings, and immodestly cutoff shorts. While on the road these two are, of course, going to forge a life-changing friendship because that’s what always happens when you stick a stubborn old man with a messed-up kid in the movies.

This trope would be forgivable if it happened organically, but the script by writer-director Adam Rifkin forces them together. When there’s a lull in the conversation, Vic just has to blurt out, “How are things with Bjorn?” (That’s her cheating boyfriend.) The two never engage in any kind of small talk. From the moment they meet, they exchange barbs and psychoanalyze each other, as if these two lost souls somehow knew before they even met that they were fated to change each other’s lives that weekend.

The reason Vic has made Lil take him to Knoxville is because, as you may have guessed, he is from there. The duo visits his boyhood home, the stadium where he played college football, and all his old haunts. He even conveniently has an ex-wife in a nursing home. There’s also a hokey romance between Lil and her brother’s best friend (Ellar Coltrane from Boyhood). Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the film is when Lil walks into a wedding wearing her cutoff shirt and shorts so short her underwear is showing—and no one says anything. What alternate reality of Knoxville, Tennessee, does this film take place in?

Additionally, the story is uncomfortably close to the Sam Elliott flick from last year, The Hero, which itself was already too close to Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges. Does this mean we’re in for a slew of movies featuring Baby Boomer Hollywood white guys repenting for their sins?

Remember 20 years ago after Burt Reynold’s Oscar-nominated role in 1997’s Boogie Nights there was a moment when it was exciting to see if he was going to make a turn and start appearing in more edgy films? But for the past 20 years, he’s mostly appeared in cameos or cash-grab roles in Christian films and straight-to-DVD movies. The Last Movie Star is set up to be the film that puts Reynolds a little closer to where he was back with Boogie Nights, by placing him in a quirky indie with a cast of millennials. Though The Last Movie Star isn’t terrible—in fact, it’s actually kind of adorable—it is a missed opportunity.