Thelma

June Squibb and Richard Roundtree shine in this oldsters heist comedy, though the plot plays it strictly by the numbers.

“Thelma” has both the benefit and detriment of familiarity. We’ve seen plenty of these “feisty oldsters” comedies before, where folks in their golden years go on unlikely adventures and get into second-chance romantic entanglements.

It stars June Squibb in the title role and Richard Roundtree as her partner in crime — or, more accurately, her wing man in attempting to get revenge on some evildoers.

Squibb, who’s had a late-in-life renaissance of supporting roles including an Oscar nomination for “Nebraska,” get a crack at the lead as Thelma Post, a 93-year-old widow in Los Angeles who gets scammed out of $10,000 in cash by some hucksters who call up pretending to be her grandson, Danny (Fred Hechinger). He supposedly has been thrown in jail after injuring a pregnant woman, and needs bail money.

Never mind the real Danny is a sweet 24-year-old who wouldn’t harm a fly. If anything, he’s a passive beta-male type, whose girlfriend just broke up with him, and he doesn’t have a career or much of any direction in life. He does love Thelma unreservedly, often helping her or just hanging out, which speaks well of him.

Thelma lost her husband, Teddy, a couple of years ago and like a lot of elderly people, finds herself lonesome and befuddled by modern technology. Danny patiently tries to walk her through the basics of using a computer, like closing pop-up windows and navigating the world of Facebook.

“Shouldn’t Zuckemborg be able to fix this?” she demands.

Her health is OK for her age, though the biggest fear of her and her contemporaries is falling down and not being able to get back up. She’s embarrassed by losing the money to the scammers, but it lights a long-dormant spark she wasn’t even aware of, and Thelma determines to track down the thieves and get her money back.

Of course, she can’t tell her daughter, Gail (Parkey Posey) and her husband, Alan (Clark Gregg), whose helicopter-parent approach to Danny gives you a good idea of how they handle Thelma. There are sotto voce conversations about maybe it’s time to find her an assisted living facility.

So she enlists the help of Ben (Roundtree), an old friend from the days when a group of married couples would take trips overseas together. Now they’re all widowed and shut off from each other, though Ben insists he likes living in an old folks’ home — even playing Daddy Warbucks in their in-house production of “Annie.”

“They have wonderful melons… fresh!” he raves, trying to convince Thelma to join him.

Neither can drive, so they head toward Van Nuys in Ben’s cherry-red electric scooter, clearly a top-of-the-line jobbie. I admit I didn’t know they came as a two-seater.

Things go from there, with various challenges including being the subject of a Silver Alert, running out of juice for the scooter and not getting themselves injured. They also stop in at an old friend’s place, where they find Mona (Bunny Levine) even more diminished than themselves, fighting a losing war against an infestation of cockroaches.

But she’s known to have a gun, which could come in handy.

Writer/director Josh Margolin knows what this material is and leans into it, not trying to pretend it’s anything more than light-hearted fare, essentially a heist movie for senior citizens. I laughed at the part where Thelma has to infiltrate a place on her own, and Ben plays the role of the “guy in the chair” coaching her through it using their phones’ connection to their hearing aids.

Still, I appreciated the movie for its authentic portrait of what it’s like to be very old. As anyone who’s there themselves or have loved ones who are, especially parents, it’s amazing and often dispiriting how much their capacity to do everyday things diminishes. The quotidian tasks of life we take for granted and bitch about become seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Squibb and Roundtree shine in their roles, and if there’s a compelling reason to see “Thelma,” it’s them. Squibb gives Thelma a stubborn sort of grace, and we find ourselves rooting for her even when she’s doing things that would give heart palpitations if it were our own mom. Ben is the cautious one of the pair, but Roundtree gives him a twinkle of rapscallion charm.

There isn’t much terribly original about “Thelma,” but you can’t deny the good feels and gentle chuckles it evokes. It’s like an afternoon spent with your grandma: you might find yourself growing a little annoyed by the end of the visit, but there’s no doubt about coming back.