‘Paint’: The ghost of Bob Ross is turning in his grave

(Known for his whispered delivery of such signature catchphrases as “happy little trees” and his equally iconic perm, Ross hosted “The Joy of Painting” from 1983 to 1994 on various public television stations and has become something of an ironic cult hero since his death in 1995. A far better and more dramatic movie than about the real Ross is the Netflix documentary “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed.”)

That’s because there is nothing especially Bob Ross-ian about Wilson’s Carl Nargle, other than his fright-wig hair, bedroom-voice narration and propensity for painting the same mountain landscape over and over and over. The fact that Carl continues to dress in bell bottoms and cowboy shirts with embroidered yokes in the present day — and has apparently never heard of Uber, based on a line of dialogue that seems meant to get a laugh, but probably won’t — suggests a version of the real Ross somehow preserved in amber.

Why? I don’t know. The film takes place in the new millennium, everywhere, that is, except for the offices of the Vermont public television station where Carl paints, before a home viewing audience of elderly shut-ins and lonely barflies, and where the putty-colored computers all look like boxlike Compaq machines circa 1990. The station’s recording equipment is equally out of date, making the film’s setting seem trapped in an inexplicable time warp. If it’s a satire, it’s not clear of what.

Wouldn’t it have been funnier if McAdams, who directs his own script here, had simply set the film in 1990 and taken a few good-natured potshots at the past, from the snickering vantage point of hindsight, instead of making one character look like he just stepped out of the Wayback Machine, and nobody noticed?

No character actually acknowledges this temporal incongruity, which includes weak jokes about Carl’s sex van, in which this frizzy-haired, chauvinistic Lothario has relations with a string of “muses,” including co-workers portrayed by Michaela Watkins, Lusia Strus, Lucy Freyer and Wendi McLendon-Covey. It’s so out of whack with what would actually happen today if someone like Carl behaved the way he does that it makes no sense.

Wilson’s portrayal of Nargle/Ross isn’t so much a performance as an impersonation. It’s a thin coat of paint, in other words, covering up some serious cracks in the storytelling.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains sexual and suggestive material, drug use and smoking. 96 minutes.