Of all the movies to reference in “Man in the Chair,” Michael Schroeder’s hackneyed intergenerational drama that loses a touching story in a barrage of excessive editing, why in the world did the writer-director decide to use Orson Welles’s masterpiece “Touch of Evil?”

Early on, as a troubled young whippersnapper named Cameron (Michael Angarano) rushes into the neighborhood theater, the manager behind the counter (Christopher Plummer) waves him in. It just started, the old man says, don’t miss the crane shot — referring, of course, to Welles’s classic opening sequence that begins on one side of the America-Mexico border with a bomb being slipped into a car’s trunk and continues uninterrupted for the next five minutes as the car zigzags its way to the other side. It is one of the great immersive moments in all of cinema, one of those standards to which filmmakers perennially refer.

Yet every rule established and adhered to in Welles’s miraculous piece of filmmaking is all but ignored by Mr. Schroeder, who takes a well-meaning if intermittently naïve story and renders it nearly unwatchable.

Since it’s the holiday season, let us start with a more charitable assessment of what the film does right. From its very first scene, “Man in the Chair” exhibits a passion for movies that should win the hearts of film buffs. The movie opens with projected scenes from Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday,” and it’s here that Cameron first spots Flash Madden (Mr. Plummer), a crusty alcoholic who yells at the movie screen and, as it turns out, was once a lighting technician for Welles (we see one of their supposed interactions in a bizarre flashback, complete with a Welles look-alike).

In addition to a love of cinema, the movie also exhibits a respect for its elders that is almost sincere enough to entice viewers to forget about the film’s torturous opening third. As Cameron befriends Flash, he comes to meet Flash’s group of elderly friends, all of whom are wasting away in sub-par nursing homes and suffocating from a lack of creative inspiration. Initially intending to make a movie about skateboarders, Cameron matures from hot-wiring cars to holding a camera and decides instead to make a movie about elder care, allowing the fogies to take the reins one last time and tell their own story.

But Mr. Schroeder never shows us their final product, never lets us in on their production meetings or their rushed shooting schedule. We don’t see Cameron and Flash collaborate on the set, or witness the spark between Flash and his aged colleagues.

Instead, the sense of empowerment appears to be little more than a repetitive gimmick. Cameron and Flash initially strike up interesting banter, but Flash’s angry façade quickly becomes tiresome and overused. And while Cameron’s student film initially seems inspired, the final shoot is reduced to a superficial and silly two-minute music video montage, complete with smiling faces on the set, Cameron behind the camera, Flash and his colleagues editing on a computer monitor, an inspiring score playing underneath, etc.

Seemingly striving for some sort of grunge effect, Mr. Schroeder relies heavily on aggressive jump cuts, flickering light flashes, washed-out music video sequences, and varying film speeds. At times, individual lines of dialogue are chopped up and strewn about, notably during some of Cameron and Flash’s earliest meetings, when, as one person is talking, the camera jumps between the past and present in one-second bursts. One has to wonder what Mr. Schroeder was thinking by making a simple, two-person scene of dialogue into the flashy chaos that Michael Bay would apply to a high-speed car chase.

Somewhere among all these cuts is a patient performance from Mr. Plummer. But somehow, unlike “Touch of Evil,” which was originally decimated by the studio and only restored to its original form a few years ago, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone will go back to assemble the essential moments and rescue the decimated characters in “Man in the Chair.” As is, this is a film that Flash — and any Welles fan — would hate.

ssnyder@nysun.com