'Hard Luck Love Song'

Director Justin Corsbie doesn't offer anything new in his directorial debut with "Hard Luck Love Song." But what he does serve is a worn-out bar stool your butt is familiar with in a honky-tonk bar filled with cigarette smoke and denim jackets.

The entire movie is based on a Todd Snider tune called "Just Like Old Times," and the narrative really does feel like it was pulled straight from a country song. So nobody should expect a deep and thought-provoking story full of mind-blowing twists and turns. A Christopher Nolan film, this ain't.

Instead, "Hard Luck Love Song" is 100% "what you see is what you get." The story follows a pool hustler and con artist named Jesse (Michael Dorman), though the movie doesn't give you his name until about 20 minutes in from a tattoo on his chest designed to look like a name tag.

Jesse drives a beat-up Chevy Nova and wears a cast indicating some kind of broken wrist or arm. He drives for a bit and pulls into a cheap motel that makes the setting of "Schitt's Creek" look like an Embassy Suites.

He carries a guitar, which the man can rightly pick at and sing with some skill. And for a while this movie is just about Jesse killing time. He sits in his motel room reading a tabloid newspaper, eats at a diner, gets some employment applications he clearly has no intention of filling out and drives around.

"Hard Luck Love Song" moves at an easy pace for its entire 104-minute run time. If it were an Eagles song instead of a Todd Snider tune, it'd be more "Wasted Time," less "Life in the Fast Lane."

Folks who watch this movie will come to see that when life is good, Jesse is an easygoing fella. A homeless man asks him for some change, and he informs the guy he'll "get him on his way back." When, by luck, he finds a $100 bill blown up against a fence, he buys some booze and gives a bottle to the homeless man, along with $20 and a hug.

But that $100 isn't going to last Jesse forever. So he pulls out his lucky pool cue and hits some bars to hustle. It's not entirely clear if Jesse is the living embodiment of a stereotype throughout the movie. Can a character be a stereotype if the entire movie they exist in is based on a five-minute song?

Jesse's character kind of feels like what Jesse from "Breaking Bad" would've turned out to be if he played guitar instead of cooking meth.

While this movie is categorized as a romantic drama, it contains quite a bit more pool hustling than one might imagine. At least one-fifth of the film is Jesse playing pool. And you'll almost never see the guy without a cigarette in his mouth or a drink in his hand. He drinks enough in "Hard Luck Love Song" to make even Keith Richards' liver take notice.

As he swindles more people, Jesse eventually enters a pool tournament, and those watching might start to get nervous through game after game because the film lets everyone know trouble is coming for Jesse eventually. It's as easy to smell as summer rain right before a storm blows in.

"Hard Luck Love Song" waits 40 minutes to introduce Jesse's love interest, Carla (Sophia Bush). But nobody should be bored as they wait for her appearance. The movie takes its time and assures folks, "We'll get there when we get there." Nobody can be a kid in the backseat asking, "Are we there yet?"

Jesse and Carla clearly have a history, and their reunion is handled well. Their chemistry is that of two high school sweethearts, each wanting something different from the other. Carla wants Jesse to change and get his life together, while Jesse just wants to reconnect and keep Carla in his life.

Carla knows her old flame is never going to change. He's not capable of it. But she decides to stick around, drink a lot, smoke, snort some cocaine, and then eventually get into a big fight with the pool hustler.

And it's not that their fight is awful. It's just not as believable as other characters in films like "Marriage Story." The fight also drags on for quite a while as these two dig at each other. It eventually gets tiresome to witness.

Jesse tells Carla to leave, he drinks more, finishes the cocaine, has a hissy fit breaking things in the motel room and throwing a chair off his balcony into the pool, just generally showing he's toxic and a horrible match for Carla. From that point on, nobody should be rooting for him.

But because this is a movie based entirely off a country song, these characters drink more and make up just a few minutes later. Then it's back to smiles and driving to a bar to get more booze. It actually gets kind of boring watching these characters drink, and "Hard Luck Love Song" even starts playing clips of other patrons in the bar drinking. The film should've been trimmed by about 15-20 minutes.

Most people should be able to predict what happens during the climax as Jesse's trouble catches up with him. Some of the men he hustled find him, beat him up and things kind of devolve from there.

The film ends as suddenly as a song with no real lessons learned, no definitive character progression and nothing of real consequence having taken place. After the screen fades to black, audiences are treated to a clip of Todd Snider actually playing "Just Like Old Times" onstage so moviegoers are hammered with the source material for this thin story.

"Hard Luck Love Song" is aimed at those who just want to put a couple quarters in the jukebox and let Merle Haggard's greatest hits play while they put a few beers away. If that's the film's greatest sin, then there's really no need to cast any more stones.