A gloomy ride on these ‘Rails’

“Rails & Ties” is the directorial debut of Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint -- which is by far the most noteworthy thing about it. Based on a painfully artless screenplay by first-timer Micky Levy, the movie is a small, mawkish melodrama about a train engineer, his dying wife and the adorable little blue-eyed boy they acquire under dubious circumstances after the engineer’s train accidentally mows down the boy’s very bad mommy.

Kevin Bacon, whose considerable talents go a long way here, plays Tom Stark, a “train man” who manfully immerses himself in his work to avoid the pain of wife Megan’s imminent death from cancer. Played by Marcia Gay Harden, his wife deals with the pain and sorrow by quoting Keats and ordering a piano she doesn’t yet know how to play. (“All that won’t be necessary,” she later tells her music teacher as he tries to instruct her in the basic piano techniques, “I just want to learn one beautiful song.”)

The couple seem destined to continue on their not-so-merry way when fate intervenes in the form of the slatternly, mentally ill, alcoholic, pill-popping Christian fundamentalist single mother of a little boy named Davey (Miles Heizer). Davey is his mother’s nursemaid and enabler, so you figure he’d be on to his mother’s schemes. But when she uses his weakness for trains (really?) to lure him onto the tracks one dark morning, where she parks her car and promptly passes out, he’s helpless.

As luck would have it, Tom is at the train’s controls. He makes a split-second decision not to pull the emergency brake and avoid derailment, but derailment -- the metaphorical kind, of course -- is what he gets. He’s temporarily suspended from his job, subjected to an inquest and forced to go home to his wife and his model train set.

Meanwhile, Davey busts out of a Dickensian foster home and makes his way to Union Station, where he tricks a colleague of Tom’s into giving him his home address. (Before the tragedy Davey fooled a school principal during a phone call to inquire about his own whereabouts by lowering his voice and announcing that his mother had died, so the gullibility of adults in the movie is already established.)

Davey shows up at Tom’s doorstep to beat up the man responsible for his mother’s death, and Megan (who laments not having had children) takes one look at him and starts wheedling Tom to let her keep him as if she were a kid who’s been followed home by a puppy.

Eastwood has assembled an enviable creative team (one of the producers, Robert Lorenz; a co-producer, Tim Moore; the director of photography, Tom Stern; the production designer, James Murakami; and the editor, Gary Roach, have collaborated extensively with her father) as well as an outstanding cast, but the material seriously limits what any of them can do. As lovely as some of the footage looks and as committed as are the three lead performances, they serve only to make “Rails & Ties” play like an exceptionally well-acted and well-made Lifetime movie.

What can you do about a scene in which a suspicious child services case worker shows up and says, “There’s a little boy missing, and I couldn’t help noticing that the room smells freshly painted and there’s a little toy train on the shelf.” I mean, you could have the crazy dying lady who’s hiding the (grateful) kid reply, “I have cancer, stage 4. . . .” and pass it off as her spare room, but that might make some people start fantasizing of parking their cars in front of trains.

Scenes like this one, not to mention the wall-to-wall plaintive acoustic guitar score by Eastwood’s brother Kyle and the (sorry) one-track thematic obsession that brings everything back to trains (and I mean everything, like a flashback to Tom and Megan’s courtship in which the lovers murmur, “So what do you think of trains now?,” “I love trains,” “I love you”), make it hard to resist employing railroad-related cliches generally used to describe things that go badly wrong. Having had enough of those to last me a while, I think I’ll resist the temptation.

“Rails & Ties.” MPAA rating: Rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements, an accident scene, brief nudity and momentary strong language. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.