In Francesco Lucente’s new film, “Badland,” Marine Corps reservist Jerry Rice (Jamie Draven) returns from combat in Iraq to his native Montana, having been discharged under “conditions other than honorable.” Jerry is free of visible wounds, but essentially crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder. Jerry’s wife, Nora (Vinessa Shaw), who’s pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, hectors her husband with such relentlessness that the scorn only lets up when she falls asleep. Jerry’s boss at a remote Gas and Go keeps Jerry on the payroll in order to torment him, and a coworker uses Jerry as a cover for a workplace scam.

Apparently, the entire town lacks the gene that makes it possible to honor a returning veteran. “You should have died over there,” Nora spits at her tormented husband, knowing they’re well within earshot of their kids. It’s as if Jerry is nothing more than an annoying, ineffectual ghost haunting the lives of the ungrateful community whose freedom he was ostensibly sent to the Middle East to protect.

But Jerry is very much alive and very close to the end of his tether. When Nora steps one indiscretion and about a dozen uses of the f-word over the line, Jerry transforms horrifcally from brooder to shooter and uses his service automatic to trim back his family by three-fifths. When the smoke clears, Jerry and his adoring daughter, Celina (Grace Fulton), are the only Rices left. Jerry and Celina take to the road and eventually arrive in a new town where Jerry finds a sympathetic new boss in Oli (Chandra West), the gorgeous young proprietress of the local diner. Jerry also discovers a kindred spirit in Max (Joe Morton), a fellow Marine Reserve Gulf veteran whose own wartime experiences have rendered him even more of a basket case.

Unfortunately, Max is also the town sheriff. With the law still on his trail and Max close at hand, Jerry’s borrowed time begins to run out at an accelerated rate. Though bonding with Oli and Max and reconnecting with Celina have given him a taste of redemption, it soon becomes clear that Jerry will have to pay for his crimes and pay dearly. The only questions remaining are how high the cost and who will have to pay with him.

“You ever feel anything?” Max asks Jerry over coffee at the local diner. “Nothing good,” Jerry replies. We know he’s not being glib because we’ve seen it.

“Badland” clocks in at a whopping 2 hours and 40 minutes. Though beautifully photographed by Carlo Varini, a veteran of several Luc Besson productions, who ably captures the film’s stark, rural, Canadian locations in winterly shades of blue, magenta, and gold, there is only so much footage of Jerry agonizing in private, staring off into the horizon, or striding purposefully to nowhere that one can absorb in a single sitting.

Mr. Draven assumes the thankless job of maintaining the film’s emotional center and the audience’s empathy in spite of the fact that his character kills two of his pre-teenage offspring onscreen. It’s a tough sell under any story circumstances. Mr. Lucente’s script labors to establish Jerry’s ill-treatment at home and on the job and the horrors and hypocrisy he endured in Fallujah. But most of the film’s extended early scenes of domestic and workplace strife depict Jerry enduring profanity-laden tirades that dully ring with the one-note exaggerated urgency of melodrama. What actually happened to Jerry in Iraq is disclosed so late in the film that it seems of little consequence compared with the mess he’s made of things since. It doesn’t help that Mr. Draven, a Manchester, England, native, alternately gains and loses his approximate Plains accent. Much of the time he unaccountably sounds like he’s Irish.

Mr. Lucente clearly has strong feelings about the war and the plight of the men and women returning home from fighting it. Nevertheless, “Badland” is afflicted with a peculiar empty, linear quality, and it fails to dig into the messy human morass of experience, emotion, and need lurking beneath moral indignation and standard-issue anti-war pieties. One doesn’t watch the film with the impression that Mr. Lucente truly knows these people, and that lack of knowledge is passed from director to cast. Everyone rants and gushes, and the long arm of the law closes in. The breathtaking snow-capped peaks of Alberta mutely bear witness to exponentially increasing tragedy while composer Ludek Drizhal’s lovely but suffocating and omnipresent score sighs and wails.

“Badland” remains dramatically inert and numbing. Ultimately, the fates of Jerry, Max, and Celina speak more to narrative desperation on the part of the filmmaker than to the grisly toll taken by war.