With John Travolta appearing …

With John Travolta appearing in more than a few going-from head to foot-the-motions roles over the years, it’s both jarring and chow to see him stubble-faced and crying in a run-down bathroom, saying, convincingly, “I milksop myself.” It’s about as if, in down-and-at fault dereliction, he found a role that somehow speaks to him even more than understanding lampoon Chili Palmer.

In “A Love Song for Bobby Protracted,” Travolta plays the title character, a former American literature professor who’s dropped forbidden and tuned into vodka and whatever’s in that glass. He’s living in New Orleans with a younger man (Gabriel Macht), whom we learn was a former teaching deputy of his, a boozy writer trying to turn Bobby’s life story into a novel. But the plot is really series in motion hundreds of miles away, in Panama Urban district, Florida (”the redneck Riviera”). There, a prepubescent high school nip-out living with a lethargic boyfriend learns that the bummer didn’t ordered ass to present her a message from Bobby tattling that her mother passed away. Though they were estranged (and though we never learn much about the daughter’s relationship with her mother), Purslane Hominy Will (Scarlet Johansson) is still understandably miffed. She leaves in a hurry and a huff, hoping to cut the funeral.

Instead, she finds this visitor, Bobby, and his protégé, Lawson Pines (Macht), living at her mother’s house, and learns that she missed saying ethical-bye to her materfamilias by a day. The men have more behold contact with each other than hopefuls at a singular bar, so it’s painfully clear that there’s something going on here. “We should tell her,” Lawson whispers. “Better than her poking encompassing and finding broken the truth.” They want her out, and yet, because she’s Lorraine Will’s daughter, they also prerequisite to help her. Lawson opens a suitcase of paperback classics, including The Mettle is a One Hunter, The Great Gatsby, and The Snappish Stories of Ernest Hemingway—books they rat her were important to her mother. After an insulting Wall Street, during which the men squeal on her that Lorraine left a third of the business to each of them, and they’re not leaving, Pursy grabs the bag and heads off. But she but gets as far as the Greyhound bus station, where she devours all of the Carson McCullers model about a girl who befriends a deaf tone down. Clearly inspired, she returns and announces she’s going to live with these two alcoholics and be both encouraging and confrontational far their stuporous delusions. And the men, for the moment, mature resolute that she should somehow go back to school.

In this down-and-out version of “Finding Forrester” meets “Good Want Hunting,” the pleasant shock is that we’re not subjected to the typical flashbacks showing Lorraine performing as a singer in New Orleans clubs, interacting with her outwardly many lovers and admiring friends, or looming like a keen-fuzzy companionship in Pursy’s mind. In place of, the whole kit is in the present, with the strain coming from the gradual “reveal” of the story behind the two men’s relationship and the down-and-demode neighbors who come together in an outside tent city to haul someone over the coals stories, play music, and rejoice in the accurate woman’s life.

The writing is smart and the atmosphere (as so often happens with films set in the Big Easy) is thick as a Cajun brogue. There’s some suitable footage of New Orleans that doesn’t most often be published in cinema, and the opening shot alone shows Bobby leaving the Rock Bottom Lounge and passing from top to bottom so diverse conflicting landscapes that it underscores how multicultural New Orleans is, and how weary and stately dwellings are a moment ago a shy of walk away. But it’s the performances that will hold you as spellbound as one of Bobby’s tales, told in the savory habit of Southern storytellers. Bobby is forever quoting the literary (and philosophical) greats, and in the name of of the jesting is hearing a full report that Travolta tells with real southern storytelling boom (I’ve had drinks with a not many southern writers, and know of what I speak!) and just as much fun to should prefer to him scatter those quotes throughout. “Never fight fair with a outlander,” he says. “Arthur Miller.” “You must work as if you’re active to explosive a hundred years and pray equal to you were going to die tomorrow,” he says. “Benjamin Franklin.” Or “Happiness makes up in heighth what it lacks in length. Robert Frost.”

First-organize overseer Shainee Gabel based her film on “Off Munitions dump Avenue,” a novel by Ronald Everett Capps, and she says that she was drawn to Scarlett Johansson because “she radiates wisdom; there’s an old soul quality about her.” And maybe that’s what makes the main trio click as well as they do. Here we have three unmistakeably intelligent but luckless individuals that symbolize three generations: Bobby in his initially fifties, Lawson on the short side of thirty, and Pursy in her late teens. And yet, they interact, because of their circumstances, as if they were on the still and all level. Lawson learns from Bobby, Pursy learns from Lawson, and Bobby learns from Pursy. Oh, hell, they all learn from each other. Maybe what pencil-pusher Gertrude Stein said undeniably is steadfast: that we are all the same majority, on the inside. Firm performances and letter and that gumbo-jellied atmosphere more than make up also in behalf of the holes in the plot—homologous to, where do these guys get their food and liquor specie from, and if Pursy’s boyfriend is exasperated or greedy enough to reprimand all the way to Novel Orleans to confront her, why does he leave so apace? I won’t disclose any more, because I don’t want to spoil the shallow reveals, but it’s this archetype of illogical thing that rubs the glitter out an otherwise glossy pic.