Movie review: Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke play out an intriguing ‘True West’-style brotherly friction, but the story stalls

Sam Shepard’s “True West” is a play about sibling rivalry between two brothers gone kablooey, and for the first third or so of the new film “Raymond & Ray” on Apple TV+ starring Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke, there are hints that we’re headed in a similarly intriguing direction.

A dark comedy from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, it feels like it’s adapted from a play (it’s not), with the focus on the two estranged half-brothers of the title who reunite upon the news of their abusive father’s death. The old man’s final wish: That they attend his funeral and dig his grave.

With his tidy haircut and overall appearance, Raymond (McGregor) is the more buttoned down of the two, whereas Ray (Hawke) is the low-key outcast with his tats and guns and long-kicked heroin habit. That dynamic is very much akin to “True West” – in the play, the brothers are ultimately revealed to be two sides of the same coin – and it also reminded me of a Broadway production more than 20 years ago when Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly would switch roles on alternating nights.

There’s some of that energy here too and the suggestion (maybe only in my own mind) that McGregor and Hawke could easily switch roles here and be just as interesting to watch.

There’s a downside to this kind of what-if, because for me it underscores just how much the film plays like an acting exercise rather than a fully lived-in story. The tension between Raymond and Ray, threatening to erupt, is the most interesting thing about the movie in its early going – and yet instead of delivering on that promise, it fizzles.

The brothers have been muddling through life unsure of who they are – “we come from chaos,” is how one of them puts it, which explains everything and nothing – but the story itself is even less sure of who these men are. Their lives haven’t panned out, Ray says without much emotion either way. What does it actually mean for your life to “pan out,” or not? I wish Garcia was interested in poking around that wound a bit more and seeing what kind of mess is really inside.

Dad was a jerk. That left its mark. He gave his sons the same name just to screw with them. “You don’t have any good memories of him?” Raymond asks. “I’ve some,” Ray says “I wish I didn’t.” Hawke’s voice is low and rumbly and raspy, in contrast to McGregor’s flat, non-location specific American accent. Later, as they sort through their father’s belongings, Raymond finds some photos: “Our two moms, so beautiful, before he sucked the lifeblood out of them.”

And yet everyone who knew their father later in his life has nothing but good things to say about the man. “What was he like as a father?” someone asks. The worst, says Ray. Huh, comes the reply.

You keep waiting for the brothers to explode. Or at least hash out this dissonance about their father’s legacy that has left them so confused. But they remain mostly muted, and instead turn to the young women who knew their father in his final years – one an ex, the other his nurse – as if finding some kind of romantic succor with these strangers is the answer to anything.

Hawke and McGregor are the kind of actors who hold your attention as the story evaporates around them. Even so, they deserve far more to play with than they get here.