My man Ben Affleck just can’t catch a break. His career has been a series of precipitous rises and steep plunges. From a breakout Oscar win with Good Will Hunting to the critical depths of Gigli in his whole Bennifer period, onto his comeback directorial streak (which ended in a Best Picture win for Argo) which then led into a second slump following his turn as Batman in the largely maligned DCEU. Ben’s trajectory is like the stock market during a pandemic. It just can’t decide whether to float or flounder.

In The Way Back, Affleck is so dopey you’d think he was just caught in the midst of his infamous Sad Affleck meme, culled from the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice press tour that was not meant to be. This is not the snarky smart aleck or the cocky beef boy we’ve come to associate with Affleck’s notable performances. This is Sad Affleck, the character. And there’s wisdom to this reinvention. After all, Ben’s younger bro Casey won Best Actor for playing a suffering husk of a man who accidentally and drunkenly burned down his house with his children inside. Wap wap. Why shouldn’t Ben take a whack at his own west coast Manchester by the Sea? Tragedy breeds good reviews and little gold trophies.

Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a former high school basketball star turned to a life of hard-drinking. He’s a miserable wretch chugging himself into an early grave. Separated from his wife, untethered from his family, and with no community to call his own outside of the rapscallions at his neighborhood watering hole, Jack is a wasteland. He sucks down beers by the case and sinks shots of well liquor until he needs to be carried home by a kindly bar patron and airdropped onto his lonely mattress for one.

By the powers of narrative convenience, Jack is asked to take the position of head coach at his alma mater when the former coach suffers a head attack. It’s a random happenstance of a setup that speaks to the underwritten quality of Gavin O’Connor and Brad Ingelsby’s script. But if you squint hard enough and keep your focus on Jack’s character and Affleck’s performance, the story is none too tough a pill to swallow.

[READ MORE: Our glowing review of the Trey Shultz’ ‘Waves‘ about a high school wrestler who makes one bad decision after another]

Jack’s newfound turn as coach puts him in a Catholic school, sizing up players of questionable quality. Armed with a pint of Hendrick’s and his “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight” approach, Jack seeks to turn his band of merry misfits into winners. And actually does so. Problem is, all the hard-drinking, public expletive-laden outbursts, and general junkyard dog antics don’t really square with the Christian code of conduct of turning the other cheek.

Jack wants his guys to scrap for every bit of flesh, to outmaneuver and outsmart the opposition and wear away at them one inch at a time. He prays at the altar of the chipped-shoulder and encourages his guys to get rough. If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em up. In time, we learn that there is more than just a draw to hard boozing and athletic aggression that drives Jack’s depression and isolation, and then things turn a hard left into the capital of bummersville. I’ll leave the reveal for readers to discover for themselves but, take note, it’s a doozy, and provides Affleck the best opportunity to really sink his teeth into the withdrawn tortured misery of the performance.

While a good portion of the sports drama material is made up of cliché, dime-a-dozen sports movie tropes, director Gavin O’Connor (Warrior) pivots away from the humdrum stuff in the closing minutes to reveal that he was never really so interested in telling just another underdog sports drama. There’s plenty of foreseeable turns in the narrative – and they’re as easy to pick out as guys over 6’5″ in a crowd – but O’Connor dribbles away from crowd-pleasing climax that we’ve been programmed to expect and in doing so earns some credit for taking the path less traveled and going on to still score nonetheless.

Affleck’s quiet, reflective performance is amongst his finest work and signals a turning point towards a new receptive arc, though, for me, it never quite reached the kind of emotional peak known to get me all misty-eyed. In my none-too-expert basketball parlance, the guy delivers a solid lay-up but a three-point swish this is not. To his credit, O’Connor has offered up a slam dunk of a sports drama before (if you have yet to see Warrior, now is the time.) This time, he settles for the free throw. A score may be a score, but this is a lesser one.

CONCLUSION: Ben Affleck steps up to the line to deliver a notable performance as a troubled alcoholic basketball coach but ‘The Way Back’’s quiet, deliberate approach is not going to hype viewers up the way sports movies of this sort usually do. Its reliance on heavy, depressing themes and a train wreck of a protagonist may leave some suffering through the unpleasant misery of Jack’s company.