The long title of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” adapted by director Andrew Dominik (“Chopper”) from the novel by Ron Hansen, is meant to call to our minds the Victorian melodrama and ballad that the April 1882 murder turned into. But it is misleading. The movie is not really inspired by the sensibility of the 19th century, but by the celebrity culture of the 21st century.

In fact, it would be more accurately titled “The Ballad of Bob Ford.” Young Casey Affleck plays the cowardly “assassin” — a title meant to be suggestive of his victim’s celebrity rather than his notoriety — as a sort of Mark David Chapman, a fan whose obsession with his idol tips over the brink of sanity and finally induces him to kill the one he loves.

Brad Pitt’s Jesse James, by contrast, remains a curiously shadowy figure, obviously both charismatic and dangerous but not actually very interesting. The story is that Mr. Pitt, a native of Missouri like the James brothers, has long been a fan of the romanticized outlaw and his legend. If so, perhaps he’s the real stalker here.

“Do you want to be like me or do you want to be me?” Jesse asks Bob in the movie when his worshiper’s attentions begin to creep him out a little. It’s a question that the audience might think to ask of Mr. Pitt himself. The awe he feels on assuming the character of his hero appears to have paralyzed him.

It might have helped if the film had included a bit more action instead of spending so much time — and, at 160 minutes, it is an hour too long — on leisurely atmospheric takes of distant figures set against vast and poetic prairie landscapes. The look of the film appears to have been heavily influenced by John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956) — except that lots of things happen in Ford’s film.

Only one of the James gang’s celebrated acts of banditry is depicted in “Assassination” and it seems to have been the last one — the robbery of a train at Blue Cut, Mo., in October 1881. And no one is hurt in the attack except for a clerk, who is badly beaten by Jesse. When Jesse is about to finish the man off with his six-shooter, he is stopped by another member of the gang, Ed Miller (Garret Dillahunt).

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do, Ed,” Jesse says menacingly. But then he walks away and, seemingly, allows the clerk to live. Ed is later — much later — the only man we actually see Jesse kill, though a voice-over tells us that Jesse was responsible for at least 17 murders. Obviously, in order to preserve our sympathy for a man it sees as a prototype of the rock star, Mr. Domink’s movie has to play down his less attractive qualities, including his Confederate loyalties — the ostensible reason for his having embarked on his career as an outlaw — and his tendency to mayhem.

But neither, equally obviously, can the film allow us to forget the latter. A sense of danger is a big part of what makes Jesse a rock star. That’s why Mr. Pitt’s stock-in-trade here is understated menace. Everybody in the gang seems scared to death of him and we, too, wait eagerly for the explosion of violence that will confirm his reputation.

It never comes. Or, it comes only on the periphery of the main story, and in ways meant to suggest comic absurdity rather than the sublimity promised by the hero-bandit who is offered for our admiration. He remains a largely static figure, almost an icon of the suffering Christ who even seems to will his own death at the hands of his Judas, Bob Ford.

In other words, the movie is itself an act of celebrity worship — as is also suggested by the casting of James Carville as Tom Crittenden, the governor of Missouri. The only supposedly deep question that interests the filmakers is why Ford doesn’t inherit Jesse’s celebrity, as he expects to do, when he kills him.

But the answer to that question is not very hard to figure out.

The movie is also marred by cutting the roles of Frank James (Sam Shepard) and Dorothy Evans (Zooey Deschanel) to the bone. On the positive side, however, I can’t fail to mention Sam Rockwell’s terrific performance as the cringing Charley Ford, Bob’s brother, and the haunting, minimalist score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis that almost makes the movie’s vast vacant spaces serve the purpose that its makers want them to serve.