Losing Africa in Translation

In recent years, Western movies about Africa (Edward Zwick's "Blood Diamond," Kevin Macdonald's "The Last King of Scotland," Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda," et al.) have been knocked for smoothing the jagged edges of reality with glossy storytelling and polished filmmaking. "Ezra," directed by Nigerian-born Newton Aduaka, suffers from the opposite, and in a way more frustrating, flaw. This hellish chronicle of a child soldier during Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s is ultimately undone by deficiencies in its execution.

Flaws of presentation may sound like a picayune concern in regard to a vital and underrepresented episode in the region's numbing epidemic of suffering — right up until those problems start interfering with conveying that reality. "Ezra," which begins a two-week engagement today at Film Forum, is boldly conceived, especially for its trenchant flashback structure and for working without relying on explicit horror. But it's more compelling in outline than coherently realized.

Ezra (Mamoudu Turay Kamara) is in class when civil war comes knocking, or machine-gunning, at the schoolyard gates. After being marched off at gunpoint through the jungle by rebels who oppose one-party government, he and other grade-schoolers grow up with a new education in guerrilla combat and cynical revolutionary cant. Innocence is hollowed out and filled with the experience of giving and enduring cruelty under the leadership of diamond-funded thugs. It's not long before we're present for the battalion's chaotic slash-and-burn raid on a village.

These wartime episodes, which take place from 1992 onward, are punctuated by the confessional efforts of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission 10 years later. The crimes of the teenage Ezra are aired before his family, respected elders, and community in a makeshift hall, under the guidance of a bemused American general (Richard Grant). Much like the courtyard "trial" of past Western meddling in Abderrahmane Sissako's "Bamako," Mr. Aduaka's scheme underlines the entanglement of past and present suffering. (Token scenes also spotlight nefarious white people, gaming loyalties and selling tranquilizers.)

The war shatters Ezra's own family, whose sufferings rival Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus": Marauders have cut out the tongue of his sister (Mariame N'Diaye), and his father may have been felled by his son's own bullet. (The hands of others were severed with machetes to prevent voting.) The blustering, rugged youth grapples with his shattered psyche and sags under the unrelenting strife, though the courtroom scenes reveal a traumatized defiance.

The character of Ezra and the strands of his life pull together a lot of the film's good, if wasted, ideas. As both victim and monster (though Mr. Kamara is never too monstrous), Ezra is an antihero emblematic of internecine conflict. But Mr. Aduaka's shuttling framework, erratic direction, and uneven camera work yield incoherence and make it tough for the cast to sustain our focus. Ezra's relationship with the proud idealistic daughter (Mamusu Kallon) of an assassinated journalist is another casualty of the dispersed approach.

A more serviceable drama wouldn't tame experiences beyond the ken of most moviegoers, but find some way of getting closer. After the fabulous malignance of kids raised to kill, then shot up with methamphetamines for four amnesiac days of homicidal hell-raising, there's a palpable shortfall in the nuts and bolts of scene building, emotional connection, and so on.

"Ezra" made its premiere last year at Sundance, where it must have been a bracing alternative to many typical offerings, and it's at least a change of pace from mission-of-hope or culture-clash documentaries involving African youth. Sierra Leone, which was originally undermined by neighboring Liberia, has been recovering in dribs and drabs, but its repeated U.N. designation as the world's "least livable" country bears the echoes of the bloody past retraced by "Ezra."

At Film Forum through February 26 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).