Current-events dramas aren’t usually the most inviting, or warmly invited, theater experiences. “The Situation,” a schematic take on today’s meltdown-era Iraq, arrives at a prime moment, when politicians of most persuasions are criticizing some aspect of America’s conduct of the war. The title suits the disputes, which often center on how to frame the matter: Are these the growing pains of any fledgling democracy? Is it a stubbornly complex operation, a civil war, a policing problem? None of the above, all of the above: It’s the situation.

Whether you think that sounds portentous or pretentious probably predicts your reaction to filmmaker Philip Haas’s earnest but vexing drama. Clearly arising from an illustrative impulse, “The Situation” is an unabashedly talky, worked-out attempt to dramatize the key elements of a shifting scene that Americans discern by the light of reported explosions and brass flare-ups. It’s the picture the Pentagon might resort to screening when “The Battle of Algiers” proves too subtle.

Like most foreign entanglements brought to the screen, “The Situation” begins by centering on attractive, beleaguered Westerners, but they rapidly blend into the maelstrom of Iraqi politics on the ground. Danish actor Connie Nielsen, radiant and wrapped in robes, plays Anna, a roving journalist investigating the drowning death of an Iraqi boy at a checkpoint. When insurgents kill one of her sources (Rafeeq, played by Nasser Memarzia), she delves deeper, feeling equal parts sympathy, exhaustion, and guilt.

While Anna struggles to make sense of the mess, Dan (Damian Lewis), a local American official and her sometime lover, marshals his limited powers toward fixing part of it. Dan peddles a hearts-and-minds approach to his superiors, which involves dicey alliances with the likes of an unctuous diplomat (Mahmoud El Lozy) and other Iraqis who might be playing both sides. Dan’s office nemesis is a bow-tied young smartypants who cheers “democracy by force” but lacks savoir-faire.

A hunky Iraqi photographer (Mido Hamada) assists (and attracts) Anna, but despite the glamour of her profession and the festering intrigue of the setting, “The Situation” resists becoming a thriller or indulging romance. The prevailing feel to the film is foreboding disaster and tantalizingly thwarted escape. An informant’s family knows he will die; Anna drives out to interview an insurgent only to be locked in a pottery kiln for hours. Violence, both obscure and spectacular, reigns.

But the grating flaw of the film lies in the screenplay, adapted by correspondent Wendell Steavenson from her own experiences. Mr. Haas and Ms. Steavenson, despite choosing fiction over documentary, squander the supple resources of storytelling by stuffing their characters’ mouths full of exposition and theatrical observation. The film’s political quick-sketches don’t necessarily require nuanced creations, but the filmmakers should be able to convey the shifting sands of tribal diplomacy, for example, without a point-by-point monologue from Dan about the nature of truth. (And a sex scene serenaded by mortars is best left buried in a frenzied magazine article than enacted.)

The stiffness is true to form for Mr. Haas, who has specialized in literary adaptations of varying rigor and rigidity, from Paul Auster’s “Music of Chance” to A.S. Byatt’s “Angels and Insects” to Somerset Maugham’s “Up at the Villa.” The director began his career with a series of global art documentaries, and those, too, often resembled “The Situation” in being informative despite a lackluster style.

“The Situation” is destined for a similar reception to the director’s past films, as at once overblown and underripe, even laughable, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Lewis appear to recognize this treatment’s limitations.

But despite its shaky execution, the production does illuminate a subtle weakness native to the flood of Iraq documentaries. Ironically, the movie achieves a certain clarity by depriving viewers of the frisson of the real as well as the narrative adrenaline boost experienced in the by-now familiar documentary recipe of blindsiding violence, ephemeral beauty, and captured confessions.

Like the most recently lauded slice of Iraq exposition, “Iraq in Fragments,” “The Situation” expresses the predicaments of ordinary Iraqis, including the less innocent among them. Local and family loyalties overshadow national concerns, and the threat of kidnapping or murder makes open support for occupying forces risky and rare.

Unfortunately, this empathy is undercut in the other direction by caricatures of American soldiers as boorish or cagey, instead of exploring their own frustrations. It’s this sort of unevenness and the slides into pontification that ultimately mark “The Situation” as a first step — an early, awkward stage in the ongoing evolution of cinematic responses to a conflict that eludes tidy solutions.