From left: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Catherine Keener, and Jane Fonda. (Jacob Hutchings/IFC Films)

Geeky teenager Jack (Nat Wolff, whom the tween set may know as a songwriter for the Naked Brothers Band) uses a video camera to document a road trip, frequently namechecking Werner Herzog. If only this were Grizzly Man, and he were filming his own murderer. The self-conscious young filmmaker is a character that has turned up in films from Peeping Tom to Step Up 3D, and can evoke obsession, identity, and the very nature of the image. In the multi-generational rom-com Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, the plot arc of the budding video artist is just the final nail in a formulaic box that is supposed to be about loosening up, but is walled in by convention.

Jake’s mom Diane (Catherine Keener) is a Manhattan lawyer whose husband (Kyle MacLachlan) files for divorce before empty-nest syndrome has quite set in. Theirs was evidently the coldest of relationships, and for some unknown reason Grace takes this opportunity to reconnect with the hippie mother Grace (Jane Fonda), whose liberal platitudes and colorful lifestyle she had cut off from her life for twenty years. Grace is the mellow matriarch and pot dealer in her adopted town of Woodstock, whose eponymous music festival is where we are supposed to believe Diane was born (note: Keener was born in 1959). Among Grace’s free-spirited and oh-so laid back friends is folk-singer he-man Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whom Grace tries to set up with her daughter. What she doesn’t tell her daughter would be a spoiler, so I will not reveal one of the film’s more uncomfortable plot points, but seriously, did you want to see this? And would you not figure it out?

The big news story in this cast is supposed to be Fonda—in only the fourth feature she’s made in the last twenty years—but what it says about MacLachlan’s career is worth noting. The former David Lynch regular makes his living on the small screen these days, but the last time I saw him in a feature was a minor role in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2, for which he wasn’t even credited.

Chase Crawford and Elizabeth Olsen preview the summer catalog. (Jacob Hutchings/IFC Films)

The leads make this barely watchable — at first. I don’t consider Jane Fonda a thespian treasure to be cherished like the bald eagle that flies into one pillow shot like something out of an E Street souvenir shop, but she makes a relatively grounded, recognizable type out of what could have been an unbearable counterculture cliche. Keener’s stony features perfectly convey her character’s conservative nature, though the freedom we are probably supposed to feel when her pot-growing mom teaches her how to get down is more seen than felt. Morgan is the kind of dimple-bearded candy deposited in your standard issue chick-flick to ensure coos from the Lifetime crowd. It’s not his fault they forgot to dub his voice when he painfully fumbles through “The weight” in the early stages of courting Diane. Fortunately, they remembered to replace his fractured baritone when he opens up to sing at the town’s music festival to reveal the voice of a completely different man. Diane’s vegan daughter Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) fares somewhat better, as her paramour-who-challenges-her-preconceptions turns out to be pretty-boy butcher Cole (Chace Crawford, a Gossip Girl regular who has made a smooth transition from wealthy tv kid to aw shucks L.L. Bean model).

Director Bruce Beresford cut his cinematic teeth in the Australian New Wave, but graduated to prestigious condescension like Driving Miss Daisy, and his latest is simply cliched hackwork under the vague auspices of independent filmmaking. What was IFC thinking? Characters make regular references to Walt Whitman and Werner Herzog but fail to find any of the danger and poetry in either of them, and the last straw comes when Jake’s vapid film project, which juxtaposes his family’s romantic trials with war footage, somehow gets accepted into something called the New York Youth Film Festival. Is it that easy to get into? I admire the rare and unusual candor in a Variety article that sizes up this movie’s prospects: “there’s no denying its B.O. potential.” Sure, I realize they mean “box office potential,” but their take is more accurate than they know.

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Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
Directed by Bruce Beresford
Written by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert.
With Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Elizabeth Olsen.
Rated R for drug content and some sexual references
Opens today at E Street and the Cinema Arts Theatre