“This, That and Everything in Between” is a perfect covers-all-the-bases title for a soap opera. In this case, the soap in question is a feature length film from the Philippines.

But “soap” is what this meandering mess stumbles into after an opening act that struggles to be a laugh-free farce about a delusional diva actress coming “home” to get to know the screenwriter-daughter she abandoned 27 years before.

When the laughs don’t come, let’s reach for melodrama?

That mirrors the plot of this Cholo Laurel (“Afterlife,” “Wherever You Are”) potboiler. A rising star screenwriter (Jodi Sta. Maria), famous for rethinking her plots on set, juggles her way towards an American screenwriting fellowship by toying with abrupt changes in direction of the script she’s already pitched to Hollywood.

But Jo has a hard time focusing on the writing and her Big Chance when her self-absorbed, short-tempered actress/birth-mother shows up after 27 years.

Paz (Agot Isidro) had her own shot at stardom at home in the Philippines. But she dashed off to New York to try and create an American film breakthrough while she was still young and beautiful enough to be labeled a “starlet.”

Now she’s “home,” “allowed” back in the country some say. Nobody recognizes her as a well-preserved but grey-haired diva, which has her biting the head off of cab drivers and profanely tearing her 20 year-old son Mattias (Gabriel Lazaro) a new one over pretty much any slight.

Jo isn’t all that into re-connecting with “Our Lady of Eternal Absence.” She’s got an award-winning series to keep afloat and final prep for that Brooklyn writing fellowship to take care of.

But Dad (Gardo Versoza) insists she come home to San Rafael, to the people who raised her and the insecure narcissist who didn’t. He needs Jo’s help with all this.

Paz insults siblings who’ve made careers on the Filipino stage and Filipino Netflix series. Her screaming bouts with her son don’t lessen her “issues,” or his. He’s twitchy, and has taken to getting stoned to tune her out.

“You don’t GET me (in Filipino and English),” Paz shrieks to her ex, her extended family and anybody else within earshot. But Jo, “JoANNE,” as her mother insists on calling her, isn’t hearing it and isn’t having it.

And then, dang it all, the movie abandons any sense of exaggerated “fun” it was reaching for and turns melodramatically serious.

The script is structured to have an awkward “reunion” dinner with family eat up a lot of the second act, and as Matti turns out to be the truth-teller in mom’s many tall tales about her “success” and real life, that promises laughs. Not many arrive, but at least they’re promised.

Then the picture lurches into a kind of unemotional, tasteless bittersweet reverie that threatens to put viewers to sleep.

In a youth-oriented business like film and TV, Jo seems entirely too old (she’s 37, since mom left her when she was ten) to be pursuing or seriously considered for a “fellowship” in a profession she’s already been a success in.

But not a whole lot of this makes sense. A favorite moment for me was when our diva yanks off her wig…to show us even shorter but less grey “real” hair underneath. What’s all that about? A compromised bit of half-committing to the part?

Isidro is over-the-top and amusingly awful in the lead role, but even she struggles to land an “out loud” laugh.

The other family issues stuff isn’t particularly well-handled, either. The dialogue isn’t that quotable even if the leads are decent, having just enough edge in their performances to give them credibility as estranged mother and daughter.

Notice, Mom, how I have no old family photos of you and me before you left. “You were never there.” But who, Mom spits back, does Jo think was TAKING those photographs?

Little dollops of heart and moments that ring true make you wish this movie played. But it doesn’t. It drifts away from Jo’s on-set TV writer problem solving and becomes a script that even Jo couldn’t fix, cliches and tropes and “soap opera” plot tricks or not.

Rating: TV-MA, smoking, drug abuse, sex and profanity

Cast: Jodi Sta. Maria, Agot Isidro, Gardo Versoza and Gabriel Lazaro.

Credits: Directed by Cholo Laurel, scripted by Cody Abad, Cholo Laurel and Shania Sumergido. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52