Rails and Ties is the first feature film directed by Alison Eastwood. To get the inevitable question out of the way: Eastwood the Younger doesn’t stray too far from the classical construction favoured by her father. Yet the straightforwardness of her direction isn’t the problem — Micky Levy’s schematic screenplay is.

Rails and Ties lays intriguingly messy emotions along a predictable trajectory: it’s one thing to contrive a scenario whereby an orphaned 10-year-old boy (Miles Heizer) sets out to find the train driver (Kevin Bacon) who didn’t slow down to avoid a car containing his drugged-­out, suicidal mother; it’s another to have him arrive to find the driver’s wife (Marcia Gay Harden) in the throes of regret over never having children — not to mention the final stages of breast cancer. Do I need to tell you that they take the boy in?

With the threat of any sort of asymmetry or surprise neutralized, there’s nothing to do but wait out the inevitable narrative knot-tying and consider the performances. Both Bacon and Harden are fine and the latter’s underplaying of a potentially hysterical role suggests an intelligent actor-director collaboration. But the supporting cast are wooden, and a few other lapses (under-decorated sets, soundtrack treacle) undercut the real virtues on display.