Starring Lily Tomlin and Julia Garner. Rated PG.

Like many inexperienced caregivers, Grandma takes a while to figure out what it can do best. When we meet Lily Tomlin as the aptly named Elle Reid, she’s a retired academic and once-famous poet still getting over the death of her long-time partner and now dumping a much younger girlfriend (Judy Greer) because—well, she’s really not a people person.

One gal who can get underneath her crust is teenage granddaughter Sage (the very pale, blond Julia Garner), who shows up needing help. She’s pregnant and needs money for the abortion she’s already scheduled for the end of the day.

Elle is broke, so they set out in her 1955 Dodge Royal (actually Tomlin’s own car) to raise some dough. This leads to intermittent soul-searching, some light bonding, and connection with some interesting characters.

The best of these is a man from early in Elle’s life, played superbly by Sam Elliott. But there are good bits with the late Elizabeth Peña as a bibliophile barkeep and John Cho as an irritable barista. And a superbly brittle Marcia Gay Harden eventually arrives, as Elle’s estranged daughter.

At less than 80 minutes, the movie takes its time to let people have surprisingly frank discussions and, given the central topic, it doesn’t chicken out about what’s at stake. Writer-director Paul Weitz—closer to his About a Boy territory than, let’s say, American Pie—is at his best when not trying to pull off jokey set pieces. It’s refreshing, of course, to find a flick in which sexual orientation doesn’t need to be discussed, even if life-altering decisions obviously do. The early scenes, however, put so much effort into setting up Grandma as a noxious nightmare that our investment in her eventual softening is somewhat limited.

Kudos to Tomlin, then, that by the time we get to something like redemption, we pretty much accept her the way she is.