José M. Hernández’sremarkable risefrom Central California migrant farmworker to NASA astronaut is the stuff of Hollywood dreams, and so it’s no surprise it has finally become a movie.

Unfortunately, despite its ready-made storyline and some likable performances, the curiously inert “A Million Miles Away” never achieves liftoff, even as its hero does.

Hernández spent half his childhood in Mexico and half in San Joaquin County, where he was born and where he and his family worked on farms. José, played as a boy by Juan Pablo Monterrubio, also goes to school but struggles to learn English. When he displays a talent for math, a teacher (Michelle Krusiec of“Saving Face”) offers to personally tutor him and eventually persuades his parents (Julio Cesar Cedillo and Veronica Falcón) to establish roots in California so José can continue his education.

A chance viewing of an Apollo mission on television gives José purpose: He wants to be an astronaut.

As an adult, played by Michael Peña (“Ant-Man and the Wasp,”“Fantasy Island”), José is a shy nerd who meets cute with Adela (Rosa Salazar of FX’s “American Horror Story: Murder House” and Netflix’s“Brand New Cherry Flavor”) while buying a used car. Without much drama, they marry and she becomes the kind of wife often seen in such movies, who encourages him to be self-confident while gently prodding him to be the best he can be.

After earning engineering degrees, José lands a job at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he is at first dismissed and patronized, presumably because of his ethnicity (the likely discrimination that Hernández faced is hinted at rather than addressed; seems the movie just didn’t want to go there). As he rises in the ranks, he applies for NASA’s astronaut training program and, of course, is rejected more than once.

因为我们已经知道,埃尔南德斯becomes an astronaut— he flew on the space shuttle Discovery during a two-week mission to the International Space Station in 2009 — there isn’t much suspense to “A Million Miles Away,” so in theory the task for co-writer and director Alejandra Márquez Abella (who directed Peña in two episodes of the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico”) is to develop a compelling personal story.

There isn’t one. Despite being based on Hernández’s 2012 memoir “Reaching for the Stars,” the movie follows all the cliches of the standard underdog biopic. Peña and Salazar are solid, but “A Million Miles Away” is rather bland and predictable, even as it is eminently watchable (especially for Bay Area viewers).

A hint of the movie’s potential is his close friendship with one of his instructors at NASA, Kalpana Chawla (Sarayu Blue of Netflix’s“To All the Boys: Always and Forever”）.他们的债券,因为印度的美国妇女nd a Mexican American man, they feel the pressure to represent in a way that a white person does not. But that friendship and the issues it raises are not satisfactorily explored.

The real José M. Hernández seems like a fascinating guy.He ran for Congress in 2012but lost, and now operates a winery,Tierra Luna Cellars, with his family, including his parents, near Stockton. He deserved a better movie.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com