“Young Rock,” Airs 7 p.m. Tuesdays on NBC

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is everywhere these days. In the movie industry he’s a genuine star, one of the highest-grossing actors in the business. His “Titan Games” was one of the most highly rated TV shows on television during the summer. He’s even big at bars, where his Teremana tequila has become a bestseller. His wrestling career is legend.

And, of course, he’s a favorite here in Hawaii, having lived here as a youth and retaining strong ties to the islands, not to mention appearing in some movies set in Hawaii (two “Jumanji” films, “The Fate of the Furious: Hobbes and Shaw” and the pandemic-delayed “Jungle Cruise”). He has a project on the life of King Kamehameha in the works.

How he got to this exalted position is the basis for NBC’s “Young Rock,” a half-hour family dramedy based on Johnson’s life, which debuts Tuesday. In flashbacks from his youth, it purports to show how small slices of life can build into something that is now larger than life.

The setup is that it’s the year 2032 and Johnson is running for president. He faces accusations that his celebrity has created a wall between him and “ordinary people,” so Johnson, appearing as himself, gives a series of interviews that fade into episodes from his youth and its requisite coming-of-age experiences.

The focal point is his upbringing in a wrestling family, and it’s not an easy life. His father, “Soul Man” Rocky Johnson, is prone to hyping his accomplishments in the ring while getting stiffed from promoters at paycheck time. Joseph Lee Anderson is appropriately comical in this role as the overly optimistic father who provides the most telling lessons to his son. Stacey Leilua brings grace to the role of Johnson’s mother struggling to keep the family afloat as a housekeeper while chasing dreams of her own.

Part of the conceit of the show is that it features real people who have unreal alter egos, i.e., stage personalities. So we meet Andre Rene Roussimoff (Matthew Willig), known as Andre the Giant, and Afa and Sika Anoa’i (John Tui and Fasitua Amosa), who in the ring are a brother act known as “the Wild Samoans.” It’s pleasing to see the Polynesian community so well represented, with Ana Tuisila playing Lia Maivia, widow to “The Flying Hawaiian” Peter Maivia, who are Johnson’s grandparents. The wrestling in the show is entertaining enough to provide some attraction to wrestling fans, especially locals who want to wax nostalgic about such characters, many of whom performed here in Hawaii.

The ingenuous part of the show is that it reveals these people to be “regular folk.” Inside the ring they are showmen and rivals, but outside they are close, card-playing friends, willing to impart avuncular wisdom to the 10-year-old Dwayne, played at this stage in life by Adrian Groulx. These scenes are set in Hawaii and have appropriate cultural markers — beach scenes, Hawaiian music — to indicate it, but the show also jumps to The Rock’s life as a 15-year-old Pennsylvania high school student trying to figure out girls, where he’s played by Bradley Constant, and to his life as a college football player at the University of Miami, where he’s played by Australian-Tongan actor Uli Latukefu. They’re all good at blending that sense of wonderment, awkwardness and overconfidence that defines youth.

Once upon a time, the idea of a wrestler-turned-actor-turned-celebrity running for political office would have been considered funny in and of itself. But Ronald Reagan, Jessie Ventura, Al Franken and, of course, Donald Trump have disabused us of that notion. There’s still something amusing about it, but only mildly so, that sets a reflective tone underpinning the entire show. It’s the creation of Nahnatchka Khan, who was also executive producer for “Fresh Off the Boat,” and it has the quietly funky sensibility of that show.

This is not a laugh-out-loud, joke-after-joke show. It has quirky, fun characters and provides some chuckles here and there, especially at the thought that the world of “fake” wrestling can have any relationship at all to “real life.” But as we are reminded at various times, “fake” to these people is a four-letter word.