New York celebrity gossip columnist Jeannette Walls is about to marry a businessman. But while her life seems idyllic, her past is gnawing at her. Raised by an artist mother and an offbeat inventor father – who always promised to build his family a glass castle – her childhood is more than complicated. Not sent to school, she lives in admiration of her father even as she is terrified of him and his alcoholism. Jeannette grows up on the road, moving from town to town with no real point of reference. Now an adult, her life is now very far from the ideals of her parents, and she decides to confront her demons.

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In 2013, Brie Larson shone in Short Term 12, a beautiful movie by Destin Daniel Cretton about the staff of a residential treatment facility. Since then, the actress has won the Best Actress Oscar for Room. Her reunion with the director for this an adaptation of the autobiography by Jeannette Walls seemed perfect. But there is no magic here: The Glass Castle piles on all the clichés of bad independent cinema, with life lessons and big dramatic scenes we’ve seen a thousand times before. Although Woody Harrelson’s performance is good, he can’t save this silly movie, which finally collapses on itself during the tearful end as the main character sweeps away her terrible childhood with a casual shrug. A compact example of the worst trends in an American tear-jerker genre that calls itself independent cinema.