“How,” William Hurt says to the dead henchman who was supposed to dispatch Viggo Mortensen in “A History of Violence,” “do you f-that up?”

That’s my question for the creators of “Game 6.” In it, a terrific cast (Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Harris Yulin, Catherine O’Hara, Griffin Dunne, Bebe Neuwirth, Ari Graynor); a script by one of America’s most acclaimed novelists, Don DeLillo; a score by one of the New York area’s best cult bands, Yo La Tengo; and a sensational idea involving the most famous baseball game in the last 20 years are all lost in a sea of verbiage as dense and impenetrable as Tim McCarver trying to talk his way through a rain delay.

For those of you not so obsessed with the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox as Mr. DeLillo, the sixth game of the 1986 World Series was the one where the New York Mets, one out away from losing the championship, came back to win when Mookie Wilson’s routine grounder skirted through the bow legs of Boston’s first baseman, Bill Buckner. In popular mythology, the play has metamorphosed into the one that cost the Red Sox the World Series; in truth, the 14 runners the Red Sox left on base in the game were far more destructive. In any event, Boston had one more chance to win the following day – and blew that game, too.

I digress, but not so much as Mr. DeLillo’s script. Playwright Nicky Rogan (Mr. Keaton), a purveyor of popular Neil Simon-type comedies, is suffering from acute anxiety over the premiere of his new play, his first attempt at a serious work. His anxiety is synced to his fears for his team, the Red Sox, as they play the legendary sixth game.

The idea that Nicky’s fears about his most personal work are linked to his fears about his baseball team is a potentially funny one. There is even the suggestion, as Norman Mailer once said of Brooklyn Dodger fans, that fear that one’s team is going to lose creates a kind of psychic paralysis that causes the dreaded event to occur. It’s up for grabs whether Nicky is responsible for the Red Sox’ disaster or whether theirs is responsible for his.

But neither Nicky’s nor the Red Sox’ drama is handled in a way that draws the viewer into them; Michael Hoffman, perhaps fearing the conventions of a sports film, directs as if he is afraid to let us into the story. We don’t feel Nicky’s emotions about the ball game, and thus we don’t feel his apprehensions for his play.

What we are meant to notice is the film’s technique. Borrowing an idea from his 2003 novel, “Cosmopolis,” Mr. DeLillo has his central character spend most of the story in a taxi stuck in traffic. The device worked on the printed page, but it makes a film as excruciating as watching your team’s middle reliever walk the bases loaded after inheriting a four-run lead. (At one point, someone behind me in the theater hissed, “Why the hell doesn’t he just get out and walk?”)

This plot device also focuses entirely too much attention on Nicky. This is not a knock on Mr. Keaton, an intelligent actor who seems to be relishing his most complex role in years, but other fascinating characters in this story get short shrift, especially the irrepressibly sexy Ms. Neuwirth as one of Nicky’s play’s backers, and Mr. Dunne as a fellow playwright who has been on the skids since being slammed by a demonic critic. “Game 6” also needs more of Mr. Downey, who is looser in the role of the critic than “Spaceman” Bill Lee on acid and who seems stuck somewhere between a Marx Brothers movie and an Pedro Almodovar film.

Even worse, Mr. DeLillo seems to have no inkling that his labyrinthine dialogue is pretentious, stilted, and alienating. A quick viewing of “His Girl Friday” or any film with dialogue by Ben Hecht might have done wonders for this picture. So, for that matter, would a viewing of the 2004 Red Sox World Series DVD. Is Mr. DeLillo such an existential frump that he refuses to see the Sox’ miracle win as an antidote for their decades of misery and self-pity? The man is his own Bill Buckner.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”