These old men of the sea prove salty and sweet

David Carradine plays Captain Zeb Hedge.

In "The Golden Boys," David Carradine, Rip Torn, and Bruce Dern share a big, dirty house on the water in Chatham. They're seamen. They're single. They're crotchety, and they're acting up a squall. The three also appear to be having a decent time skirting the earnestness, more or less, that's guiding this story of senior citizens breaking down and falling in love.

None of them taxes himself too much. They're each as you've known them - seemingly drunk or high or over-medicated - only now with an extra touch of codger. Carradine, as Captain Zeb Hedge, does his coolest-wise-man-alive thing. As Captain Jerry Burgess, Torn, using about three different accents, barks in an exclamatory bluster. And Dern, as Captain Perez Ryder, is double-strength Torn, only he mewls in a fine whine.

The gist of things is that a woman is wanted to tidy their house and their lives. As Neil Young, another oldster who wouldn't be out of place here, has sung: A man needs a maid. But the three debate what to call her ("honey" or "housekeeper"), how to get her, and who, upon her arrival, should marry her. A coin is flipped, Jerry is the winner - or loser, I guess - and Mariel Hemingway, prim and almost twice Torn's height, comes to town.

Not much goes according to plan, and the pleasure to be had in all of this is in watching these people try to open their hearts to each other. The writer and director Daniel Adams, working from a book by Joseph C. Lincoln, prefers the sugar in the human connection, but he's not afraid of the vinegar the men in his cast prefer.

"Golden Boys" probably could have gotten away with its basically kind old men (a less-than-hale Charles Durning spends most of the movie bedridden), but just as you think, "This movie needs a whippersnapper!," one shows up, an engineer played by Jason Alan Smith. None of the young people is nearly as interesting or fun to watch as the senior counterparts (John Savage, as a bootlegger, has a field day with a deep-Southie accent).

The movie itself, sweet as it is, is also plain. It was filmed in Chatham, and the quaintness Adams fosters also has the air of reenactment - it's make-believe 1905. "Golden Boys" feels very much like a modest work of community theater. Indeed, everyone speaks in stage whispers and projects to the back of the theater, even from people's bedsides. Nonetheless, a certain community goodness prevails, too. Like Ed Harris's current western "Appaloosa" and its loner marshals, the captains in "Golden Boys" come late to love. Marriage is a last-minute precaution against loneliness.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.