Starring Julianne Moore and Ellen Page. Rated PG.

Oh dear—Julianne Moore is busy dying again, as if one Oscar for extreme on-screen suffering isn’t enough. Not to be frivolous about the subject of Freeheld—Moore is routinely excellent, for the record—but the true story of Laurel Hester deserves better than this unprepossessing group hug for masochistic liberals.

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, the decorated Ocean View, New Jersey, cop asked to have her pension transferred to domestic partner Stacie (Ellen Page). She was firmly shut down by the straight white men of Ocean View’s county government, known as Freeholders, after a colonial system that still weirdly persists in that state. (Not that it justifies the lame title.)

Moore works hard to flesh out Hester, underwritten just enough to let us know that the tightly wound detective has been anxious to keep her sexuality under wraps back at the office, made that much tougher when she settles down with Page’s notably younger car mechanic.

Elsewhere, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner reduces everybody to the kind of cutout that would have seemed laughable back when he scripted Philadelphia, from Tom McGowan’s obtuse councilman (he’ll defy New Jersey’s domestic-partnership laws, but at least he’s praying for everyone) to Laurel’s conflicted workmate Dane (Michael Shannon, infinitely better than the flatfooted simpleton he’s saddled with).

When Steve Carell and his rainbow yarmulke arrive to whoop it up as “loud gay Jew” Steven Goldstein, who brought the Garden State Equality organization to Hester’s battle, it’s like we’re watching one more overabundant performance donated as an act of charity to a creatively threadbare PR effort, minus the tax breaks.

Hester’s stand contributed to 2015’s marriage-equality decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Too bad that worthy middlebrow cinema hasn’t advanced to the same degree.