'Here Today' review: Billy Crystal's confused late-life comedy-drama 

Charlie Burnz, an aging comedy writer played by Billy Crystal in "Here Today," is experiencing the first glimmers of dementia. Working in the youthful writers’ room of a sketch comedy show keeps Charlie sharp, but out in the world he loses his sense of direction and needs Post-it notes to remember the names of family members. Charlie is funny and endearing, but he’s also lost in a fog of uncertainty.

The same could be said for Crystal’s movie, his first directing effort since 2001’s baseball drama "*61*" for HBO. Crystal produced and wrote "Here Today" with Alan Zweibel, a writer and longtime friend (and fellow Long Island native); they both pulled stints at "SNL," albeit during different eras. Clearly inspired by their careers, "Here Today" is a late-life comedy drama with an added dash of something like romance thanks to Tiffany Haddish as Emma Payge, a sassy street busker who unexpectedly enters Charlie’s life.

There’s potential in the teaming of Crystal, a classy comedian with a menschy lovability, and Haddish, part of a younger and much raunchier school of comedy. But "Here Today" isn’t thinking in terms of generational clash (Crystal is 73, Haddish 41). Instead, Haddish’s Emma is one of those life-affirming younger women that screenwriters love to drop into the laps of lonely, older men. Emma "wins" a lunch with Charlie at a low-priced celebrity auction, then ends up in a hospital with a seafood allergy and sticks him with the bill (a sequence of events that apparently once happened to Zweibel). Afterward, for unclear reasons, Emma and Charlie begin to pal around so much they’re almost joined at the hip.

The relationship is strictly platonic — or is it? The two sure talk about sex a lot. Friends and colleagues think they’re an item. Emma starts sleeping over. And when there’s a thunderstorm, she crawls into Charlie’s bed like a scared little girl. The screenwriters really should have thought twice about including that daddy fantasy, especially since they second guess themselves everywhere else. Time and again they push scenes to the brink of romance, only to back away as if embarrassed by the very idea.

As in Crystal’s other recent indie film, "Standing Up, Falling Down," there’s a great deal of mawkish family drama in "Here Today." Charlie has an amiable son (Penn Badgley), an irrationally angry daughter (Laura Benanti) and a dead wife (Louisa Krause, played in flashbacks that are filmed, distractingly, in first-person point of view). The whole narrative feels rote, and it takes a long time to arrive at the tearful speeches we long ago saw coming.

Meanwhile, there’s simply too much waffling in "Here Today." Near the film’s end, Emma and Charlie visit his neurologist, Dr. Vidor (Anna Deavere Smith). What, she asks, is the precise nature of their relationship? Together, they reply: "I don’t know." Neither, unfortunately, does this movie.