The Tender Bar

The Tender Bar is a 2021 American coming-of-age film directed by George Clooney from a screenplay by William Monahan. Adapted from the 2005 memoir of the same name by J. R. Moehringer, it recounts Moehringer's life growing up on Long Island. It stars Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Daniel Ranieri, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd. It was the final film appearance of Sondra James before her death in September 2021. It received a limited release on December 17, 2021 by Amazon Studios; then was widely released on December 22, prior to its streaming debut on Prime Video on January 7, 2022. It received mixed reviews, though Affleck was nominated for the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards for his performance. Plot In 1973, nine-year-old JR Maguire and his mother Dorothy move back in with her parents on Long Island. Abandoned by his deadbeat father Johnny, a radio DJ known as "the Voice", JR grows up with his mother's working class family. He finds a surrogate father in his uncle Charlie, the owner of a local bar, "The Dickens". JR often listens to the Voice on the radio, and Johnny calls with plans to take him to a baseball game, but fails to show up and later flees the state. Imparting life lessons to JR, Charlie shares his love of reading and encourages him to become a writer, while Dorothy is determined that her son will have the college education she never had. Though her own well-educated father never made anything of his life, she insists that JR will one day attend Harvard or Yale and become a lawyer.