Review: 'Here Today' is Billy Crystal's mushy valentine to the fear of dementia, enlivened by the byplay of Tiffany Haddish

It’s been two decades since Billy Crystal has directed a movie, and the creaky comedy-drama “Here Today” is a sharp reminder that moviegoers weren’t missing anything.

Crystal directed, stars and co-wrote (with Alan Zweibel, who gave us the infamously bad “North”) this semi-digestible stew of Borscht Belt zingers and heart-tugging drama. The one thing Crystal does right here is casting the live wire known as Tiffany Haddish to be his foil.

Crystal plays Charlie Burnz. who, like Crystal, is a 70-something with a long career in comedy, and a shelf full of trophies to how for it. (Crystal graciously let the filmmakers borrow his Tony and one of his Emmys.) Crystal lives alone in his Manhattan house, which is a short walk away from the studio of the “Saturday Night Live”-like sketch-comedy show where he punches up jokes and serves as an oracle to the other writers, all of whom are half his age.

He meets Haddish’s character, nightclub singer Emma Payge, through a silly contrivance: Her ex won a lunch with Charlie in a charity auction, and she’s using it up to get back at the guy. The lunch goes badly, when Emma learns the hard way she has a shellfish allergy, and Charlie ends up footing the bill for her emergency-room trip. Emma vows to repay Charlie, one singing gig at a time, and soon a friendship develops. How deep a friendship, and whether it comes with benefits, are topics Crystal’s script handles with all the finesse of a hippo — which is to say, the same subtlety as everything else.

Emma learns that Charlie is working on a book about his family, namely his late wife Carrie (played in flashbacks by Louisa Krause) and their now-adult children, Rex (Penn Badgley) and Francine (Laura Benanti). Emma notices the pictures of his children and grandchildren on a bulletin board, with their names on Post-its — and deduces, as the movie has been practically yelling at us to say, that Charlie is in the middle stages of dementia.

Crystal works overtime giving Charlie’s character a dream career — including cameos by Barry Levinson, Sharon Stone and Kevin Kline playing themselves at a Lincoln Center retrospective for a movie they made from one of Charlie’s scripts. And he paints Charlie as something of a saint, doting on his granddaughter Lindsey (Audrey Hsieh) ahead of her bat mitzvah and encouraging an awkward sketch writer (Andrew Durant) toward comedy gold. Even when his dementia causes a manic episode, Crystal turns it into shtick.

With “Here Today,” Crystal — as writer, director and actor — falls into every melodramatic trap one can expect in a film about dementia. Those pitfalls are even more glaring in comparison to Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning performance in “The Father.” But contrasting those films is like saying “The Graduate” and “Animal House” are the same because they’re both about college.

So why endure “Here Today”? For Haddish. She starts big and brassy, turning the shellfish allergy into full slapstick, and is a belter of a singer, performing Fats Waller and Janis Joplin with spirit. She settles down a little once Emma’s friendship with Charlie finds its level, and shows a flair for drama that will serve her well when she finds better material.

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‘Here Today’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 7, in theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for strong language and sexual references. Running time: 117 minutes.