Sitting on the deck of Suncoast, the Florida hospice facility that gives writer-director Laura Chinn’s debut its name, a despairing Kristine (Laura Linney) discusses her son’s imminent death from brain cancer with a grief counselor. The counselor reminds Kristine that her life will go on after he’s gone, and asks her if she has any other children.

“No,” Kristine answers, definitively. Then, after a few seconds, embarrassment washes over her. “Oh my god, yes,” Kristine says. “I have a daughter.”

That daughter is Doris (Nico Parker), the teenage protagonist of Suncoast and a stand-in for Chinn herself, who based the script on her real-life experience of losing her older brother to brain cancer. The resulting film, which premiered at Sundance last month and is now streaming on Hulu, is a promising coming-of-age tearjerker that brings a lot of heart, but nothing new to the genre.

Doris, a soft-spoken shy kid, is used to being an afterthought. With her father dead, it falls entirely on her firecracker mother to take care of the slowly dying Max (Cree Kawa) and work long hours to pay private school tuition for Doris. Kristine frequently interrupts her daughter’s attempts to make friends, learn how to drive, and even just lounge on the couch and watch TV, ordering her to help out with Max instead.

So when Max’s condition worsens and Kristine begins sleeping at the hospice center, Doris seizes the opportunity to live out her teenage dreams, and makes a habit of inviting the cool kids over for unsupervised partying. Her burgeoning social life injects Suncoast with constant tension, like when a furious Kristine walks in on a racy game of truth or dare, or when Doris has to rush into the bright lights of the hospice center in a flashy club outfit. 

A more unlikely friendship blossoms between Doris and Paul (Woody Harrelson), a widower and right-to-live activist often protesting outside of the hospice center Max is in because it happens to also be the same one housing Terri Schiavo—another detail borrowed from Chinn’s real life. Schiavo, a patient in an irreversible vegetative state, became a household name in the early aughts when her parents and her husband entered a lengthy legal battle over whether she had a right to die. Doris and Paul may not see eye to eye on the Shiavo debate, but Paul becomes a fatherly figure for Doris, watching the Super Bowl with her and teaching her to drive.

Harrelson is charming as always, but his character feels entirely too convenient and contrived, strolling into frame whenever Doris is in need of a pep talk. The intergenerational buddy friendship isn’t the only Sundance drama stereotype that Suncoast fulfills. Its dramatic musical swells are too on the nose, and backhanded compliments from Doris’ peers that hint at class disparity feel entirely too forced. In its weakest moments, Suncoast leans on indie tearjerker tropes to do its heavy lifting, making it feel like a movie you’ve seen a dozen times before.

If Suncoast spent less time on the predictable relationship between Doris and Paul, it could have spent more time developing the relationships between Doris and classmates Laci (Daniella Taylor), Brittany (Ella Anderson), Nate (Amarr), and Megan (Ariel Martin). Instead of flattening these characters into two-dimensional popular kids, the film gives them interesting, surprising personalities that ring true. Chinn has a knack for capturing the emotional tides of adolescence, and the time she spends exploring them makes for Suncoast’s strongest moments.

Suncoast does not work without Parker, who nabbed a well-earned breakthrough performance award at Sundance. Her quietly powerful characterization of Doris holds its own next to much less subtle performances by Harrelson and Linney. The film also does not work without Chinn’s intimate familiarity with the environment she’s depicting. From a People magazine cover announcing the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt breakup to a soundtrack that features Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” and STRFKR’s “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second,” Suncoast exhibits a firm sense of time and place.

It also exhibits a profound understanding of death, and how it intertwines with life. A lesser movie might shove a thesis statement about grief down its audience’s throats, but Suncoast approaches all its characters with empathy, even as they disagree about what they owe to the dying and the dead. Suncoast delivers a good bit of wisdom, if you’re willing to put up with the genre cliches.

Suncoast (R, 109 minutes) is available to stream on Hulu starting today, Feb. 9.