With a promise he has made to his parents to “bring honor to our family” still ringing in his ears, a gifted young Chinese physics student name Liu Xing (Liu Ye) arrives at a bustling Southwestern American college campus to uncover the theoretical origins of the universe. But in “Dark Matter,” the feature film debut by the Chinese-born opera director Chen Shi-Zheng, honor is in fatally short supply. Victims of their own expectations and of youths spent cloistered in academia at home, Liu Xing and his fellow Chinese arrivals are bemused, if not outright mystified, by the customs, personalities, and temptations that surround them in the strange land they have adopted in the name of science.

Their hosts seem just as perplexed by them in return. Rich university patron Joanna (Meryl Streep) is conciliatory and generous to an unintentionally patronizing degree. Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn), Liu Xing’s department head, pours on the charm in person, but in private he shares his doubts about the abilities of students from “a place where astrology is considered a science and indoor plumbing a luxury.”

Liu Xing plunges eagerly into his studies and quickly surpasses his more assimilated classmates. He also cautiously tests the cross-cultural social waters. Mixed messages abound in both arenas. An initially awkward introduction to a pretty blond townie girl grows considerably more awkward when Liu Xing attempts to detail the magnitude of his affection for her.

The physics department is soon exposed as little more than an academic sweatshop devoted to maintaining its chairman’s prominence in the field, and Reiser’s enthusiasm for his protégé’s tireless work ethic vanishes when the young man’s hypotheses threaten his own. “He’s a brilliant guy,” Reiser says while obliterating Liu Xing’s career with the stroke of a pen. “Unfortunately, he’s not a team player.” Off the doctoral fast track, far from home, and struggling to make ends meet by selling cosmetics door-to-door, Liu Xing’s mind comes out of the interplanetary clouds and thoughts of matter and energy turn into shame, anger, and, tragically, revenge.

Fast on the heels of “Chapter 27” and “The Killing of John Lennon,” two dreadful films that failed miserably to delve inside the mind and motivations of John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, “Dark Matter” (“inspired by a true event”) presents a considerably more fictionalized and comparatively visionary version of a story in which a 28-year-old Chinese physics student named Gang Lu executed five people and then himself at the University of Iowa in 1991. For most of the film, Mr. Chen does an admirable job of externalizing Liu Xing’s spacey naiveté and alienation through solidly crafted visual conceits, including soft-cut transitions and low-key computer graphic fireworks, of the “A Beautiful Mind,” genius-at-work variety. But as the pilgrim slips toward lunacy, the shortcomings of Billy Shebar’s script grow apparent.

Reiser’s egomania and petty intransigence, while likely credible in the competitive halls of American higher learning, take on the single-note stridence of melodrama as the film moves toward an unpleasant climax. By the third act, Joanna’s peculiar, ineffectual bond with Liu Xing doesn’t seem to have much reason to exist. Ms. Streep throws her considerable acting chops into a role that never quite gets up off the page, perhaps because it needed to be reworked there a bit longer.

Mr. Liu contributes a winningly wide-eyed performance for as long as his character remains sympathetic. But as scenes depicting Liu Xing’s private desperation and torment seem to stretch into infinity, it’s hard not to divorce oneself emotionally from his downward spiral. Intercutting the young man’s killing spree with shots of his devoted parents at work as human cogs in the machinery of industrialized China only serves to further undercut what little dramatic mass the character’s transition had to begin with.

In a sense, every narrative is “inspired by a true event.” We either recognize enough of the authentic moments and sensations that have made us who we are to bond with a protagonist, or we don’t. The brilliant thing about “Libra,” Don DeLillo’s remarkable fictionalized biography of America’s most famous homegrown assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is that Mr. DeLillo sensitively awakened his readers to the reality that most of us have more in common with Oswald than we do with his presidential target.

Though it is a considerably better-made (and bigger-budgeted) movie in every way, “Dark Matter,” like “The Killing of John Lennon” and “Chapter 27,” simply can’t establish the same connection that Mr. DeLillo’s book made with his readers. Three-quarters of the film’s running time is devoted to detailing the reasons for Liu Xing’s rampage intellectually, yet by the end, his crime feels emotionally arbitrary.

The sharp downturn of story in “Dark Matter” stops the pulse of what is otherwise a lively and interesting film just as fatally as a hail of bullets.