In a world of endless sequels and remakes, it’s easy to lose sight of a less common but more valuable phenomenon—what one might call the spiritual successor. These are films that take their inspiration from, and hence owe their very existence to, a single ancestor, but are not pointless carbon copies; characters get substantially reimagined, the scenario’s tweaked in productive ways, and you wind up with a work that stands entirely on its own (generally with no explicit credit given to its source-of-sorts), despite the unmistakable resemblance. Paul Schrader, to cite the most notable example, has been making spiritual successors to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest for his entire career, with First Reformed merely the most blatant of them (and not even the most recent; The Card Counter also qualifies). Given enough time, a successor can even produce a successor of its own, passing the baton down generations. That’s very much the case with Clio Barnard’s fourth feature, Ali & Ava, which recapitulates (by Barnard’s own admission) Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s great 1974 melodrama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which itself radically remixed Douglas Sirk’s great 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. I’m not convinced that this iteration achieves anything particularly noteworthy—Fassbinder did most of the relevant work, truth be told—but the impulse, at least, merits respect.

All That Heaven Allows explored romance through the lenses of class consciousness and ageism, with a New England community losing its collective mind simply because a wealthy middle-aged widow (Jane Wyman) falls in love with a younger working-class man (Rock Hudson; viewers, start your subtexts!). Fassbinder retained the May-December aspect but replaced class with race, casting Moroccan actor El Hedi ben Salem as the young man. Here, Ava (Claire Rushbrook) isn’t dramatically older than Ali (Adeel Akhtar), allowing for sharper focus on the specific difficulties of an interracial relationship. Ava’s half of the equation is straightforward: She has adult kids from a previous marriage, and her son, Callum (Shaun Thomas), is an angry bigot who’s clinging to false memories of his abusive father and violently hates the idea of Mom getting romantically involved with anyone, much less with a [ethnic slur deleted]. Ali’s situation is trickier, as he’s in the process of separating from his own wife, Runa (Ellora Torchia), but the two of them are still pretending to be together in order to avoid upsetting his tradition-bound parents. And that’s pretty much the extent of Ali & Ava’s narrative conflict, as both parties grapple with the question of whether they’re attracted enough to each other that they’re willing to endure the hassles that any real commitment would inevitably entail.

Most of this unfolds exactly as you’d expect it to, though I for one was unprepared for the hamhanded degree to which Ali and Ava’s very different personal backgrounds are echoed by their wildly different taste in music. The first thing we see in the movie—it turns to be a flash-forward, anticipating an especially bleak moment for him—is Ali climbing atop his car and half-dancing, half-shadow-boxing to a track by the Afro-Futurist band Onika, which mixes sounds from Ghana and London. (The film is set in Bradford, West Yorkshire, not too far from where Barnard grew up.) He’s heavily into rap, electronica, anything modern and aggressive; he also creates raps of his own, though not with enough apparent facility that it’s ever likely to become a career. Ava, by stark contrast, prefers country and western, though they find common ground listening to The Specials together. It’s the kind of film in which someone plays Bob Dylan’s “Mama, You Been on My Mind” when feeling lonely and isolated, and while some of the rowdier needle drops are fun, Ali & Ava’s reliance upon tunes as emotional shorthand eventually starts to feel facile, as if seeking to compensate for character depths that aren’t being plumbed by creating Ali & Ava’s Infinite Playlist.

It helps enormously that Barnard—whose remarkable feature debut, The Arbor (2010), hinges upon several extraordinary lip-synced performances—continues to demonstrate an expert hand with her actors. Rushbrook takes full advantage of the most significant big-screen role she’s been handed since Secrets & Lies (in which she played Brenda Blethyn’s daughter; Rushbrook is now roughly the same age that Blethyn was then), making Ava, who works as an elementary school’s classroom assistant, the sort of open-hearted woman for whom denying children anything—least of all her own children, however misguided their demands might be—feels like a betrayal. And she generates real chemistry with Akhtar (Four Lions, The Big Sick), who struggles to convey exactly what’s preventing Ali from just pulling the Band-Aid off of his failed marriage (none of the scenes at Ali’s home really work) but comes to spiky life whenever given the opportunity to pitch some woo. “Shit, I’m gonna get pelted with stones there, ain’t I?” Ali asks Ava while driving her home, after she tells him which council estate she lives in, and it takes some real spin on the ball to make such a question flirtatious; that he then wins over the neighborhood’s kids (who do in fact initially hurl rocks at him) by blasting a track by a local rapper from his car is emblematic of this film’s strengths and its weaknesses.

Ultimately, what holds Ali & Ava back is an absence of real urgency or discovery. Barnard was reportedly inspired as much by two people she met, who served as the basis for the title characters, as by Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, though she did view Fassbinder’s film as a model to emulate. And that’s easy to believe, given how much these people and this milieu feel independent of the camera’s attention, suffused with more credible detail than is strictly necessary. But there’s a bone-deep yearning in Fear Eats the Soul (and in All That Heaven Allows before it) that’s missing here. Nothing’s eating anything, frankly. The film’s too fundamentally sweet for that. Still, romances between middle-aged adults, interracial or otherwise, are dismayingly rare, especially between individuals lacking any of the attributes—uncommon beauty, narrative-enabling professions, offbeat personal histories—that would ordinarily “compensate” for their failure to remain under 30 forever. This one might be a photocopy of a superlative oil painting of a magnificent landscape, but some of the beauty does filter all the way down.