Thirty years after “The Brothers McMullen,” the writer, director, and actor Edward Burns looks preserved in amber — his hair and beard have some silver, but at 58 he’s still lean and handsome in that prince-of-the-working-class Irish-American way. And it’s not just Burns who’s more or less unchanged; so is his filmmaking style. “Finnegan’s Foursome” is his 16th feature, and he’s still doing that shaggy-likable, spiky-quaint, semi-low-budget Edward Burns dramedy thing — the script that’s talky and kind of funny, though in a way that often sounds like a script; the camerawork that never strays too far from the functional; the acting that hovers between lively and broad. The style Burns works in is now closer to television than movies, and given that “Finnegan’s Foursome” is getting a streaming release (starting today), you could say it’s a minor indie movie that has found its rightful home.

It’s a sports comedy, about golf and Ireland and family conundrums (it would be overstating it to call them demons), and a key thing that might put you in the audience demo for it is if you happen to be a serious golfer. It’s a movie spun out of the love of the game. Burns, who first shows up in a samurai man-bun, plays Freddy Finnegan, a wealthy clothing entrepreneur who seems to have a happy and settled life, except that he’s got anger-management issues, all stemming from his rivalrous relationship with his irascible Irish father, Jack (Ian McElhinney).

At first, we think the movie is going to be about these two facing off. Jack, at his home in South Carolina (he came over from the old country in 1959), is hosting the latest edition of the Finnegan’s Cup — an annual golfing competition in which four members of the family face off against one another, mostly as an excuse for Jack, a retired golf instructor, to tell his old jokes and stories and reminisce about the days when he was good enough to rub shoulders with the Big 3 (Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player).

He’s a blustery egomaniac, though he strikes us as a warm-hearted one. And Freddy, of course, resents the hell out of him. But what we think are going to be the fireworks between these two come to a halt when one of the players hits a hole in one and Jack keels over in shock, dead of a heart attack.

The family now has to scatter Jack’s ashes in the four locations he has chosen in Ireland (two of them are golf courses). And that’s an excuse for Freddy, who resents his da even in death; his more benign older brother, Teddy (Brian d’Arcy James), a novelist who has been suffering from writer’s block; Freddy’s musician son, Frankie (Brian Muller), whom he treats nearly as cavalierly as his father treated him; and Teddy’s adult daughter, Marie (Erica Hernandez), to take a week’s vacation in Ireland, where they’ll play out the Finnegan’s Cup at a handful of fabled golf courses, smacking around some home truths along with the ball.

There’s plenty of on-the-nose dialogue (“His dying wish was to get us all back here to Ireland”), as well as cornball boasting (“It’s not about the clubs, little brother, it’s about the man who’s swingin’ ’em”) and generic braggadocio (“I believe that is what you call an eagle!”). Freddy and Teddy never stop making side bets and busting each other’s chops, mostly about who has the better golf game, this being the locker-room form of brotherly love. If the family tension simmers, it’s mostly because Freddy and Teddy have opposite feelings about their father. Listening to their back-and-forth taunts, Marie says, “I’m sorry, so this entire trip is nothing but constant ball-busting?” Swap in “movie” for “trip,” and you’ve got an idea of “Finnegan’s Foursome,” though you should also toss in Frankie doing his cringe mock-sports-announcer banter.

“Finnegan’s Foursome” is structured as a sports movie, and Burns, working with the cinematographer Jeff Muhlstock, connects you to the geometric majesty of the links. But when you watch a film like “Tin Cup,” part of the thrill is that you want to see the Kevin Costner hero win; that’s the dramatic Zen of a sports film. Watching “Finnegan’s Foursome,” we’re not overly invested in whether Edward Burns’ entitled a-hole gets a winning golf score over his novelist brother.

There’s a touching scene where three of the characters sing “The Parting Glass” at a pub. But here’s how “Finnegan’s Foursome” is a bit soft. The movie is about Freddy coming around to see that his da really did love him, and that he wasn’t such a bad guy (he gave him the love of golf, after all). But the reason we readily buy this is that it’s so apparent from the outset. Jack’s big crime? Being away “at the office” (i.e., the golf course) too much. As ultimate sins of parents go, it’s kind of a dated sin. You want to say to Freddy, “Stop whining.” Especially because the Jack we see, in his competitive Irish way, had a lot of spirit; he was no ogre. Of course, he also tried to “get into Freddy’s head” on the golf course, but that’s kind of a privileged problem. It’s Freddy who needs to dismantle the ogre of resentment in himself, and that’s not quite a movie — that’s therapy.

The blithe and likable “The Brothers McMullen” won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and went on to have a healthy theatrical life, launching Burns’ career as a homespun auteur — at the time, he almost seemed like the shoestring Irish-American answer to Woody Allen. I was a fan of the early Burns films (especially “She’s the One,” his 1996 crossover movie, costarring Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz), but his moment in the spotlight didn’t last long. After crossing over, he kind of crossed back, retreating into the not-fully-on-the-radar indie wilderness. That’s where he has remained, and watching “Finnegan’s Foursome” you see why: He’s trying to stay true to his world (all the Irish chop-busting and piss-taking), but he hasn’t grown as a filmmaker. Then again, maybe that’s not so important. He doesn’t hit long drives, but by the end of “Finnegan’s Foursome” the ball is in the cup.

The English director Mark Jenkin works a bit like a local artisan from another era. Filming in and around his native Cornwall, he shoots his pictures himself on a 16mm Bolex, the kind of camera that might have been used by film students decades ago and that produces tactile, slightly grainy images. He also edits the movies himself, and records his sound later, layering in dialogue and effects and music (sometimes composed by himself) with an austere, handcrafted precision. This gives Jenkin’s work a certain timelessness, as if it belongs to the past but not to any specific period of the past. True, such an old-fashioned approach could feel performative, like an unusually well executed Instagram filter. But Jenkin’s style ties directly to his subjects and his expressive philosophy. His latest, Rose of Nevada — which stars two name actors, Callum Turner and George MacKay, and opens in New York today after doing the festival rounds — has the beguiling simplicity of a fable and the captivating textures of a dream. It stays with you like an unexpected and unanswerable question.

Jenkin privileges atmosphere through the collection of minute, sometimes abstract details. Set in a sparsely populated and depressed fishing village, Rose of Nevada opens with the unexpected return of the empty boat of the title, thought lost decades ago. Its arrival is announced by close-ups of barnacles, of rusty edges on ancient metal, of curious plant growth and moldy, tangled coils of black rope, as if its return was just part of a broader natural order. The Rose of Nevada clearly has a tragic history, which perhaps explains the psychological paralysis of the few remaining townsfolk. But it’s here, and so it must set off on a new fishing voyage.

Joining the journey, almost as if they were pulled towards it, are Nick (MacKay), a downcast man who needs money and seems incapable of meeting his young family’s most basic needs, and a drifter, Liam (Turner), whom we first see running down a road as if he were fleeing something. Both men are alienated from their environs, though for different reasons: MacKay conveys Nick’s quiet awkwardness well, and Turner has a charming, freewheeling energy that suggests he’s up for anything. When they return from the fishing expedition, however, the two men find that they’ve transported back several decades in time, and they’re mistaken for — or rather, they appear to be inhabiting the bodies of — two young deckhands who died long ago. Now that it’s the 1990s again, the fishing village is thriving, its local pub crowded with people and blaring pop. Nick and Liam see the younger, happy versions of the broken townspeople they’d left behind. Liam (now known as Alan) suddenly has a family, and Nick (now known as Luke) suddenly has parents. It’s almost as if the young men have been offered to the harvest gods as a sacrifice. And it’s worked.

So, it’s a ghost story, and a time travel story, and a folk tale, and something of a kitchen sink drama, but it’s also none of these things, really, and that’s where Jenkin’s formal gambits come in. His filmmaking has a lovely, homespun directness. We can feel scenes and moments being constructed, which fixes our attention on seemingly simple exchanges. An example: Early on, we see Nick hand his daughter a candy. Other filmmakers might shoot such a scene in a quick, offhand manner to mask its emotional weight, but Jenkin goes in the opposite direction, shooting everything in relative close-up and cutting the action to both extend and clarify it: We see Nick pull the candy out of its box, we cut to the girl receiving the candy, we see his wife see the girl, we cut to the wife taking the candy, we cut to a close-up of her unwrapping it, we cut to the girl getting the candy back, and we see Nick’s response. On some level, this could be an introductory filmmaking exercise: a whole series of extremely deliberate shots and edits designed to show this man’s feeling of inadequacy. But within the general precision of Jenkin’s style, the moment doesn’t stand out. Instead, it’s one in a long line of specific, human moments through which he builds his narrative and conjures a mood.

Such straightforwardness give Rose of Nevada a fable-like quality: There’s no narration, but we feel the deliberate rhythms of the storytelling, the telling emphasis on certain details over others. But weirdly, it also has something of the opposite effect: The film’s intimacy and Jenkin’s attention to the elements (along with his fondness for elliptical, well-timed flash frames) lends everything an otherworldly aura. Despite the time travel premise, nobody’s running around looking for a time machine to take them back, nor are they wasting much time trying to figure out how the dynamics of time travel work. The writer-director lets the unexplainable remain unexplained, because he’s interested more in our emotional response to it. We watch how people interact with these transformed versions of Nick and Liam, and we watch Nick and Liam’s own disparate responses to this new world, to the competing philosophies of life that emerge from this bewitching film. Rose of Nevada’s power lies in its peculiarities.

SANTA BARBARA — Sixty-one years and a day after he laid down the epochal “Like a Rolling Stone” in a recording studio on Seventh Avenue in New York City, Bob Dylan shuffled onstage on the other side of the country dressed so fine in a dark jacket with the hood pulled over his head.

The hood, which Dylan has been wearing even for shows without the cool coastal breeze that blew through the Santa Barbara Bowl on Wednesday night, has lately become an object of online fascination; one guy on X last year wrote that he was obsessed with the rock legend’s “new dripped out look,” and I have to agree: Though there are great hooded-Dylan photos going back decades, his current wardrobe — as seen nightly against a velvety curtain lighted from below — is a vibe through and through. (His Bobness forbade photographers from shooting Wednesday’s show, which means you’ll have to consult social media for a glimpse.)

Dylan’s drip isn’t the only thing putting him into the viral bloodstream of the internet. In March, he launched a Patreon, where he’s posting short stories and apparently AI-assisted installments in an audio series called “Lectures From the Grave”; this week, he contributed his thoughts on aging to a widely shared New York Times op-ed pegged to President Trump’s 80th birthday. In my social feeds, at least, quotes from Dylan’s piece — “You’re an old king from some vanished country,” he wrote — kept turning up next to clips of Timothée Chalamet celebrating the New York Knicks’ NBA Finals win — an oddly poetic interleaving given their history.

All this stuff is cool; I admire veteran culture-shapers who figure out how to adapt to a new information environment. Yet one of the reasons it’s fun to encounter Dylan on Instagram is because you can still encounter him in the flesh. And at 85, he’s absolutely cooking on the road right now.

Wednesday’s show was the first in a handful he’s playing around Southern California this week, including a gig scheduled for Saturday night at Palm Desert’s Acrisure Arena. For years after the release of 2020’s pulpy “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” Dylan said he was on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour; this month, though, he started selling T-shirts that describe his latest run of dates as the Long Hot Summer tour — precisely the sort of taxonomical quirk to get Bobheads going in the comments.

The concert, which ran about 80 minutes, mixed four cuts from “Rough and Rowdy Ways” with older Dylan songs like “All Along the Watchtower” and “To Be Alone With You” and covers such as Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell” and Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown.” But the whole thing felt like one continuous dream state, as Dylan — accompanied by a four-piece band dressed in dark colors to match the boss — croaked, gasped and crooned from behind an electric piano he played like somebody knocking the keys with his arm as he reaches for a drink.

“False Prophet” was a raunchy blues while “When I Paint My Masterpiece” rode a luscious rumba groove; “Crossing the Rubicon” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” both from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” got arrangements completely different from those on the album.

To the astonishment of many a Bobhead, Dylan’s guitarist Doug Lancio was replaced in Santa Barbara by Julian Lage, the youngish jazz star known for his work with Gary Burton and John Zorn. (Dylan said nothing about the change, nor about anything else, from the stage; a spokesman for the singer said he had no word on whether Lage was a permanent addition to the band.) Lage’s playing was tender and spooky, not least in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” where every 30 seconds or so the chords would go in some direction I could never have predicted.

The result was a spectacle of emotion — you’d have to have tried not to get swept away by “I Shall Be Released,” which closed the show — but also of belief in one’s craft. Onstage as on your phone, Dylan was searching for new limits Wednesday — a lifer grinding toward the sublime.