In an effort to make clear his reasons for refusing to cooperate with Mary Harron for “I Shot Andy Warhol,” the director’s 1996 portrait of would-be celebrity assassin Valerie Solanas, Warhol friend and Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed offered what he thought at the time was a rhetorical question by way of explanation: “How would people feel about a film titled ‘I Shot John Lennon’?

What a difference 12 years makes. In 2007, two biopics depicting Lennon’s assassination from the point of view of his murderer, Mark David Chapman, made the festival rounds: “Chapter 27,” writer-director Jarrett Schaefer’s portrait of Chapman starring Jared Leto, and “The Killing of John Lennon” Andrew Piddington’s small-budget dramatizing of Chapman’s fateful journey to the Dakota, with newcomer Jonas Ball as the man behind the gun, glasses, and Salinger paperback.

“Chapter 27,” which is currently scheduled to open in March, has received the lion’s share of advanced press thanks to Mr. Leto’s De Niro-esque quest for authenticity via the addition of 70 pounds to his slender frame, not to mention the presence in the film of Lindsay Lohan. Mr. Schaeffer’s film bears the dreaded two-editor credit, a reliable indication when it comes to movie making that all was not well in post production.

“The Killing of John Lennon,” which took a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and was picked up for American distribution by IFC films, opens at the IFC Center on Wednesday. “All Chapman’s words are his own,” declares a preliminary title in Mr. Piddington’s film. Extensive first-person narration by Mr. Bell as Chapman (the actor’s prior credits are, not surprisingly, mostly confined to voice-over work) is apparently culled from Chapman’s own journals. But the Beatle-killer’s feature-length monologue is itself peppered with quotes from “Taxi Driver,” “Apocalypse Now,” and, of course, J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” It would appear that Chapman’s head was not exactly buzzing with original ideas.

Mr. Piddington’s film doesn’t exactly offer a fresh perspective on Chapman’s road to infamy, either. An early Hawaii-set scene depicting Chapman’s toxic dynamic with his youth-obsessed mother (Krisha Fairchild) plays like an outtake from a teen drama on the WB. Chapman’s troubled and loveless relationship with his wife Gloria (Mie Omori) generates equally on-the-nose dialog and wobbly scene work.

“I’ve lived a very ironical life,” Chapman offers in defense of his fussy, confrontational behavior before and after the murder. But in Mr. Piddington’s film, there’s precious little discernible irony, point of view, or indication of a unified controlling creative impulse on display, other than an apparent need to get the chronology of events up on screen as briskly and brusquely as possible. Seemingly no subtexutal underpinning was overlooked in pursuit of this one-dimensional chronicle. Layers, shadings, and narrative textures are on display everywhere in “The Killing of John Lennon,” and yet they bear no discernible story-impelling relationship to one and other.

Lennon’s death forced the mainstream media to finally fully embrace the Beatles’ social importance after a decade of hemming and hawing. But the energy of that sea change is dissipated in the more-or-less random assemblage of sound bites and news clips used in “The Killing of John Lennon” to clumsily foreshadow Lennon’s demise and clutter up the soundtrack once he’s dead. Yes, the voice-over originates with the real Mark Chapman and, per another title card, “this film was shot on actual locations,” but acknowledged sources do not a story make. A re-enactment without any passionate belief behind it or dramatic questions to pose and answer is just a re-enactment. I would’ve been just as happy if the wall-to-wall speechifying in “The Killing of John Lennon” was compiled from the teachings of Yogi Berra, staged by Jim Henson’s puppeteers, and took place on Saturn if it made the film’s shallow wade into Chapman’s mind in any way illuminating or interesting.

Lennon’s murder was tragic, brutal, and stupid. But as story material, there is nothing sacred about it. Apologies to Mr. Reed, and to the Internet Beatle pundits who have been blogging themselves into a lather about depicting Chapman’s gruesome folly on screen, but where there’s a story, there’s hope. PBS’s1988 Frontline documentary “The Man Who Shot John Lennon,” made Chapman’s pathetic unbalance manifestly real enough to render him someone worth finding out about, using such chillingly humanizing touches as a taped recording of Chapman performing “I’ve Just Seen a Face” on acoustic guitar years before he had the song’s co-writer in his gun sight. By contrast, “The Killing of John Lennon” is satisfied with presenting a ridiculous and tasteless slow-motion sequence set outside the Dakota that uses bullet squibs and a swinging light fixture to render Lennon’s death in the visual style of a USA Network quickie mafia drama. It is dull filmmaking undertaken in bad faith. I say it’s exploitation, and I say the hell with it.