‘Diminished Capacity’ has able cast

In “Diminished Capacity,” Alan Alda plays a former tavern owner in rural Missouri who is succumbing to dementia with style. To pass the time, he rigs the keyboard of an old manual typewriter to a baited fish hook, then waits for the fish to pull on the line and snap a letter onto a sheet of paper. After a small eternity (and only after judicious editing), poems happen.

It’s a precious conceit, to be sure, and the spectacle of a grizzled Alda collaborating on fish haiku may be enough to send you bolting up the aisle before the end of the opening credits. But a graceful Alda, his director, Terry Kinney, and a whip-smart ensemble have a knack for spinning such fanciful strands of straw into gold, time and again. Do keep your seat.

The title refers at once to the incipient mental incompetence of Alda’s character, Rollie, and the dithering forgetfulness of his nephew Cooper (a disarmingly out-of-it Matthew Broderick), a newspaper editor in slow recovery from a concussion. The pair are reunited after Cooper is given leave from his Chicago office, where he has been temporarily reassigned from political columns to the arguably less taxing comic-strip pages.

The new beat is probably good preparation for Cooper’s return to his provincial Missouri hometown, a Dogpatch-worthy hotbed of trigger-happy geriatrics and dumb-cluck alcoholics (represented here by Tom Aldredge and Jim True-Frost, respectively). Voices of sanity are to be found in Cooper’s beleaguered mother (the redoubtable Lois Smith), losing the battle to institutionalize her brother Rollie, and Cooper’s high-school amour Charlotte (Virginia Madsen, radiantly at ease), a landscape painter and single mom coping with problem children of all ages.

Screenwriter Sherwood Kiraly (pruning his novel) has barely established his dramatis personae of local yokels before he spirits everyone up to Chicago, where Charlotte and Uncle Rollie hope to hit pay dirt: she with her art and he with a rare Chicago Cubs baseball card.

Most of “Diminished Capacity’s” frenetic third act unfolds at a baseball-card market, a particular subculture of American-style fanaticism that is probably even stranger and more cutthroat in reality than what we see here.

Kiraly improves upon the book to some degree, minimizing the glibness of the prose while sharpening the sad-sack wit. If the material succumbs to the occasional attack of the cutes, it receives a humanizing stamp from a stage-savvy ensemble that also includes Bobby Cannavale and the peripatetic Dylan Baker. All of the actors convey the ebullience of old friends convening for an on-the-cheap reunion. The shared good spirits result in a diminutive comedy with a bounty of charm and shrewd humor.

--

“Diminished Capacity.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.