The dramatic conceit is that this is a tale about two lost souls: the slacker, who begrudgingly comes to respect his uptight father (Rob Lowe) as they walk the trail handing out missing-dog fliers, and the dog, whom the veteran director Stephen Herek (“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”) films tiptoeing through the woods under rumbling storm clouds. Give the dog a wig of blond ringlets and he could do a passable lampoon of Lillian Gish.

Nick Santora’s screenplay is a loose adaptation of the author Pauls Toutonghi’s nonfiction account of the 1998 search. (Toutonghi married into the Marshall family, making Gonker his pet-in-law.) The film makes an unconvincing attempt to update its quest to the present. Fielding and his ’90s peers are reconfigured into anticapitalist mouthpieces for Gen Z; his mother (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) endures a patronizing arc about learning to use the internet while suffering clumsy flashbacks to her childhood Akita.

Even viewers with a tolerance for this kind of saccharine cinema — oversaturated green grass, slow-motion sprinting, kindly biker gangs, and a fleeting bar squabble in which the nastiest insult is “Idiot!” — will likely say their favorite part is the end credits, which feature photos of the cast and crew members with their own dogs (and, yes, three cats).