Starring Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, and Jeremy Irons. Rated PG. Opens Friday, September 7, at the Park Theatre

The Window Tears is a terrible title for a book. What does it even mean? Anyway, that’s the title of the novel Bradley Cooper writes in the movie The Words. Okay, his character writes the novel. Well, no, actually an old man played by Jeremy Irons wrote the novel years before. And then Dennis Quaid plays another dude who writes another novel called The Words—yep, same title as this movie—about Cooper pretending he wrote The Window Tears. What the hell?

Rory (Cooper) leads a tortured existence. He lives in an artsy New York loft while trying to write his novel. Nobody wanted his first book. (Struggling writers: even having sparkly blue eyes like Cooper’s won’t help you.) Rory has a sexy wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana), who sits in his lap a lot, telling him he’s brilliant, and then shakes her ass, inviting him to bed. Writing is hell.

Rory finds a mysterious manuscript in an adorable Paris antique store. The manuscript is so good that—whoops!—Rory sells it as his own novel and becomes famous—until Irons shows up in old-age makeup to spoil things. Jeremy, your crazy Die Hard: With a Vengeance bad guy would have gone vengeful on someone’s ass for calling a brilliant novel The Window Tears.

We see the old man’s tortured yet romantic youth (during which he’s played by Ben Barnes), writing his novel in 1940s Paris, with baguettes and an adorable French girl. Even filled with clichés, it’s more fun than watching tortured yet untalented Rory and Quaid’s tortured yet untalented novelist, Clay. Poor Clay must also put up with sexy, fawning grad student Danielle (Olivia Wilde).

It’s not the actors’ fault the filmmakers thought they were doing a Nicholas Sparks novel. So much soul-searching, so many self-consciously worn scarves. And, Bradley, why not just pop some wacky amphetamines like you did when you couldn’t write in Limitless?

Watch the trailer for The Words.