All the things that make “A Man Called Otto” stand out are things that really should make it commonplace. The film is made with a level of craft and simple competence that has become shockingly rare. A genuine movie star is allowed to radiate charisma and charm, and all the performances have character nuance and emotional depth.

These should be the basic building blocks of Hollywood moviemaking and yet here we are, with “A Man Called Otto” feeling special for being a winsome dramedy with some effective moments of tearjerking tenderness. It’s not so much a matter of they don’t make them like this anymore as they should be making them like this all the time.

Directed by Marc Forster, the film is based on the 2012 novel “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, which became an international bestseller. From a screenplay by David Magee, the new film finds enough ways to update the core material to keep it fresh.

As the film opens, Otto (Tom Hanks) is buying a few bits and pieces at a hardware store and then gets into an argument with a clerk about whether he is being overcharged by a few cents for a length of rope. Once he is back at his modest row house, it is revealed that Otto plans to kill himself, but life keeps getting in the way.

There are his new neighbors, Marisol and Tommy (Mariana Trevino and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a young couple with two small children and expecting another. The trans kid who delivers the newspapers was a student of Otto’s deceased wife, a teacher. Otto also finds himself reconnecting with a pair of longtime neighbors with whom he had a falling out.

Even a self-styled “social media journalist” won’t leave him alone after Otto, who had intended to throw himself onto the tracks, saves a man from being struck by a train.

Otto seems at first to be a rigid, stuck-in-his-ways old man similar to the type Clint Eastwood has played recently in films such as “Gran Torino,” “The Mule” and “Cry Macho.”

Otto, however, is more readily open-minded and open-hearted than those Eastwood characters — but endlessly aggravated by others for a perceived lack of knowledge or abilities.

His role in “Otto” plays to Hanks’ more obvious strengths — his essential affability even when he is presenting a gruff, unyielding exterior. The sweet heart of the character is never too far below the surface.

The real standout in the supporting cast is Trevino, a comedy star in her native Mexico who brings real energy and feeling to her role as one of Otto’s new neighbors. She barges into Otto’s orderly life and brings a bit of chaos with her, inserting a much-needed liveliness into the movie as well.

It is not meant as faint praise to say that “A Man Called Otto” is nice.

The film has an easygoing, please-like-me quality that somehow never comes off as desperate but instead gives it a reassuring quality, like a mug of warm tea. It’s borderline corny, but sometimes corny can mean unselfconscious, willing to be unguarded in its sincerity. The tender message of hopefulness and spiritual renewal is a welcome tonic.