The general description of The Tender Bar is something like this: in the 1970s, a kid named JR with a down-on-her-luck single mother and an absent deadbeat dad gets raised by his bartending Uncle Charlie and assorted colorful guys who hang around the book-lined, working-class Long Island bar called Dickens.

After a limited release back in December, director George Clooney’s The Tender Bar began streaming on Amazon Prime on January 7, and naturally I had to see it. I like stories in which some lone kid is raised by a colorful adult who makes all the difference in enriching their young life — your basic Auntie Mame story has always been a retroactive fantasy of mine. Several colorful adults doing the enriching is also acceptable.

Plus, I like bars. There are so few public havens in American life, and bars are among them. Bars are a place where you can sit quietly with your thoughts or little pastimes while still feeling like you’re part of society — as the film demonstrates, in one of its better scenes, the playing of the Wordy Gurdy newspaper game in the bar is a pleasant private form of relaxation that can turn in an instant into a wonderfully social engagement. Bars consistently offer the possibility of a civilized exchange of pleasantries, for it’s a bad bartender who isn’t adept at exchanges of pleasantries, and other bar-sitters are often inclined to be sociable as well.