This cliché-filled indie film from Robert Schwartzman is about a young man dealing with the untimely death of his parents.

A reserved man with unresolved childhood issues returns to his hometown for the funeral of a parent. It’s not only the premise of Robert Schwartzman’s well-intentioned but timid feature “The Good Half,” but also a recurring premise on which many a melancholy American dramedy has been built, from “Elizabethtown” to “Garden State” to “This Is Where I Leave You.”

To point out this thematic repetition isn’t necessarily meant to undermine one of cinema’s favorite subjects — familial grief is, after all, one of the most shared and relatable of human pains. And what are movies if not echoes of those experiences? But you go to see a film like “The Good Half” hoping it will have something to say about the pain of grief. Instead, it ends up being a mishmash of similar (often better) films that came before it.

“No one ever told me that grief was so much like fear,” wrote C.S. Lewis in his 1961 book of reflections, “A Grief Observed.” That quote doesn’t appear anywhere in “The Good Half,” but the story begins more or less on that note of fear. The film opens with young Renn Wheeland (Mason Cufari) and his peculiar mother Lily (Elisabeth Shue, doing her best in an underwritten role) trying to comfort her son, whom she’s just forgotten in a shopping mall. In the parking lot, she promises never to leave him in a store again. But Renn demands further reassurance. “You’ll never leave me? One hundred percent?” he demands anxiously, unconsciously asking his mother to make a lifelong promise she knows she can’t keep.