James Gray’s “We Own the Night” arrives a full seven years after his “The Yards” garnered mixed reviews but many devotees. Like Mr. Gray’s operatic Queens saga from 2000, his latest picture is a full-throated drama involving men, family, and crime that stars Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix and evokes the work of both Martin Scorsese and John Ford. But though the actors and their director throw their hearts into this smaller-scale action-laced story about the bonds of duty and devotion, “We Own the Night” stumbles again and again over a misjudged screenplay and clunky storytelling.

Unobtrusively set in the 1980s in the heart (or “Heart of Glass”) of Brooklyn, “We Own the Night” finds El Caribe nightclub manager Bobby Green (Mr. Phoenix) at odds with his father Burt (Robert Duvall) and brother Joey (Mr. Wahlberg), both respected cops. Burt, known in the station house as Deputy Chief Grusinsky, believes Bobby is flouting any sense of responsibility for a dubious lifestyle, while Joey’s sense of rectitude and resentment for his brother flare readily into insults and fisticuffs. But Bobby, who hides his familial police ties from his club associates, does good work for his old-school Polish boss and keeps his nose clean. And he loves his girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes), whose Puerto Rican descent, incidentally, his family also disapproves of.

With the entanglement seemingly inevitable in simmering family discord, the chief notifies Bobby of Joey’s new investigation into nightlife drug-dealing at places like El Caribe. (“We own the night” was an actual motto for the city’s street-crimes unit.) The expectation that he’ll snitch on unsavory elements is clear, but it’s brute force that finally shocks Bobby into collaborating, when a massive vice raid triggers a gruesome act of retaliation. Bobby, who’s also courted by a grim Russian gangster who seeks a base of operations, turns informer and deepens the risks of his embattled family identity.

As the family incestuously plans raids and tactics against the Russians, Bobby is the burdened soul of the film. Mr. Phoenix hauls himself around with that chiseled block head and snaggle-lipped vulnerability in Mr. Gray’s richly lit interiors, which seem to turn grayer and grimmer. Mr. Wahlberg, bolt upright as the upstanding officer, is a sensitive bit of casting because we can feel the shuffle-swagger of his prior roles echo the fraternal fork in the road. And as the Russians appear indomitably ruthless, Mr. Duvall exerts his customary low-key authority.

But Mr. Gray, who wrote his own screenplay, asks too much of his well-cast actors with dialogue that’s on-the-nose or creaky just when you want to surrender the most. While the filmmaking is rousing without being ostentatious like many such crime dramas, scenes such as those between Bobby and Amada unravel under dubious direction. Mr. Gray’s storytelling can be enervatingly inefficient, too, until some hands-down bravura action sequences make one forget. One harrowing rainstorm car chase conveys Bobby’s blind, fearful plunge into high-stakes responsibility better than any tense face-off.

It’s hard to chalk the frustration up to reflexive squeamishness about archetypal prodigal-son premises or rough-and-tumble, plainspoken infighting among guys. In the final act, a truly moving simple exchange between the brothers occurs, featuring declarations you don’t often see onscreen, while through the depiction of the family unit alone, police pride is rendered newly palpable in a marvelously tacit way. And there’s a sense in which Mr. Gray’s awareness as a filmmaker is just unaffectedly old-fashioned; criticizing the improbabilities in Bobby’s secrecy, say, feels a little like carping about the fake studio sets in a classic Hollywood movie.

You can probably recognize some of the same objections spawned by the sentimentality of “The Yards.” “We Own the Night” leaves no doubt that Mr. Gray’s intentions are honorable, but the earnest, elemental force of his convictions stands too much on faith and suffers from its rumpled first half.