Nicolas Sparks is the Stephen King of the mush-brained romantic novel and, like the prolific schlockmeister of “Carrie,” “Pet Sematary,” and “The Stand,” the author has found true love in Hollywood. Producers can’t option his four-hankie epics of transformational passion fast enough. “Nights in Rodanthe” is the fourth big-screen adaptation of Mr. Sparks’s work, following “The Notebook,” “Message in a Bottle,” and “A Walk To Remember.” Like those movies, “Nights in Rodanthe” offers the kind of broad, bathetic platform for sweepingly emotive hoo-hah that a certain breed of former A-list actor craves like opium.

Rodanthe (pronounced as three syllables, not two) is a beachfront town along North Carolina’s Outer Banks whose wild, natural beauty evokes a deeper spiritual resonance for Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane). She romped across its unspoiled sands as a child and now, as a harried middle-age mother of two who kicked her cheating husband out of the house seven months earlier, Adrienne returns to Rodanthe in search of solace. A hurricane is brewing off the coast, but Adrienne has promised her childhood friend Jean (Viola Davis) that she’ll tend to her rustic beachfront inn. Jean needs to get her groove back on a Caribbean jaunt, and Adrienne’s only too happy to pack off her computer-nerd son and cranky goth daughter with her soon-to-be ex-husband Jack (Christopher Meloni), who is pressuring her to reconcile.

“Nights in Rodanthe” is almost all such exposition. Plus Richard Gere. Still trim and edgy into his late 50s, the silver fox shows up at the inn as the only guest for hurricane weekend: He’s a man whose face telegraphs Bad Karma that Must Be Resolved through the Graceful Agency of Woman’s Love. His character has a name, but let’s just call him Richard Gere. Ms. Lane, playing opposite Mr. Gere for the third time (after “Unfaithful” and “The Cotton Club”), telegraphs plenty herself. Adrienne becomes smitten with the man of mystery, who turns out to be a lonely physician with some dark secrets. He’s in Rodanthe to try to set things right — if only he can get over his own ego and lack of compassion for others.

Love blossoms, as it must, amid heedless bourbon drinking and the playing of old Brook Benton records, intimate confessions and long walks along those rugged shores — shores where wild ponies run free. And those ponies? Those ponies are a metaphor. Like Richard Gere, Adrienne must also let something go in order to be free, to grow, to be who she really is — and who she once was. One hurricane, some windblown hoochie-coochie, and, bingo, lives are changed.

Somewhere along the way, even though you know it’s a load of Hallmark Card claptrap with some mild titillation for the date-night crowd, the film is actually forgivable. Watching it on an airplane after two or three drinks, I’d be happy just to see the ever-fetching and predictable Ms. Lane do the same thing she does in all her recent movies, and groove on the scenery, and laugh a smug laugh at all the silliness. But apparently the works of Mr. Sparks dispatch their bland but sympathetic characters through all kinds of tortured permutations on their paths to enlightenment. And it’s the last half-hour here that becomes really ludicrous. The spoiler isn’t what happens to Richard Gere and Adrienne, but what happened to former Public Theater honcho George C. Wolfe, who serves as director here. Didn’t this guy used to be important? What terrible karmic debt is he repaying by churning out faceless hackwork like this?