An unfocused queer family drama that has more passion than substance.

John Lithgow is a straight actor who can play LBGTQ characters without offending anyone. In fact, he can play them with passion and understanding. Think about how he played a gay man in “Love is Strange” and how he played a transgender in “The World According to Garp.” And in “Jimpa,” he plays a gay man with views on different kinds of sexuality and a family impacted by him. And there’s plenty of passion here, but that’s basically all the film is good for.

We have characters who deserve a fresh character study, but their scenes are set on repeat as they have their conversations, have some fun, go through sadness, and back to conversations, again. There isn’t much of a story, but a view on these people.

Lithgow plays the title character, whose real name is Jim, but his non-binary teenage grandchild (or “grand thing” as he likes to refer to him) Francis calls him Jimpa, because he felt that being called “Grandpa” would make him feel old. So, let’s go with Jimpa. He is an HIV-positive gay man, who relocated to Amsterdam in his long fight for the gay community. And he divorced his wife after coming out of the closet. And this guy is complicated as he cares about people, while being selfish and stubborn at the same time.

Olivia Colman plays his filmmaker daughter Hannah, who takes her 16-year-old teenager Francis (Aud Mason-Hyde, child of the writer/director Sophie Hyde)-born a boy and now non-binary-and husband Harry (Daniel Henshall) to Amsterdam to visit Jimpa and his new spouse Richard (Eamon Farren). Upon their stay, Jimpa is considering taking up a new job offer in Helsinki, instead of going into retirement, because, again, he doesn’t want to feel so old. Another is Francis, who wants to stay with their grandpa for a year, falls in love with the 19-year-old lesbian Isa (Zoë Love Smith). And another regards Hannah in the middle of her next directing job, which could be a passion piece for her, and some abandonment issues with her sister Emily (Kate Box).

Hyde’s last film was “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which had Emma Thompson as a middle aged woman and Daryl McCormack as her much younger sex worker. As I closed my enthusiastic review of it: “This is not a love story; it’s a platonic comedy with age differences, would-be sex, and personal aspects.” “Jimpa” has sex, age differences, and personal aspects, but it doesn’t have the kind of character development that Thompson and McCormack had in that gem. It loses the magic once we go through the cycle of the family’s visit to Amsterdam, and it ends up feeling flat and inert.

As I’ve mentioned, Lithgow specializes in playing gay characters without insulting them, and with an English accent, he does some good work as the title old man. But this film is neither “Love is Strange” nor “The World According to Garp.” And Mason-Hyde was born a girl, and now doesn’t identify themself as any gender. They apply their passion of breaking down gender identity stereotypes into the character, and expresses their emotions somberly. But this film needs to study them, instead of just observing them. And we can’t even read Colman’s character, who doesn’t really confront her issues and mostly lets her child go through her pathos. I guess she acknowledges that children need to figure things out for themselves.

“Jimpa” is a drama that wants to speak for the LBGTQ, and wants the gay characters to speak their minds, and we appreciate that. But we don’t appreciate how underdeveloped the story is, and how it feels like it’s going through the motions. Even if Colman’s character is a filmmaker, she should have read the script and given out her thoughts on it.

In Select Theaters This Friday