Much as a television show free of the conventional laugh track must work twice as hard for each chuckle, so must a mockumentary be that much more efficient and polished if it’s going to draw audiences to its unconventional, pseudo-realistic universe.

We’ve seen this challenge play out in the many mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, who made it look so easy with the seemingly spontaneous “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show,” but who wasn’t able to find quite the right recipe in the dull “A Mighty Wind” and the abysmal “For Your Consideration.”

Such is the problem with “Chalk,” which proclaims itself a movie “in the ‘doc’ comedy style of ‘The Office’ and ‘Best in Show,'” but ends up feeling forced, flaccid, and distinctly unfunny — so unfunny that it actually works better as a bittersweet drama about the imposing challenges confronting today’s schoolteachers. After all, it’s difficult to laugh away the thought of a school populated by burned-out teachers, distraught administrators, and apathetic students, particularly when director Mike Akel (himself a former teacher, along with writer Chris Mass) captures it in such grim, stark “reality.”

In the film’s final minutes, we see glimpses of what “Chalk” could have been, as history teacher Mr. Lowery (Troy Schremmer), an awkward, self-conscious rookie, toils with the idea of leaving the profession early (the film opens with a statistic that about 50% of first-year teachers in America never return). It’s in his story that we find the most pathos, as he endures the difficult days early on, embraces a different method of teaching, and finally finds himself earning the admiration of the pupils who originally hated him.

The other assorted characters seem sprinkled in randomly and clumsily: the anal-retentive, sexually ambiguous gym teacher (Janelle Schremmer), the overworked teacher-turned-administrator (Shannon Haragan), and the arrogant social studies teacher (Mr. Mass), who drafts his students into helping him launch a campaign for “teacher of the year.”

They are eccentric, that much is certain. The gym teacher is a stickler for mundane rules. The new administrator runs through the hallways with her industrial-sized walkie-talkie, going to war with the truants. But what “Chalk” doesn’t seem to understand — and for that matter, what Mr. Guest apparently has forgotten in his recent efforts — is that mockumentaries should not resemble reality. It’s a mistake to say that what we’re chuckling at, when we watch something like “The Office,” is documentary styling or “believable” characters. Almost nothing about “The Office” is believable, and the comedy comes from the way these two elements — a droll approach and eccentric characters — clash.

In “Chalk,” for which the actors reportedly refined their scenes through extensive improvisation before mixing themselves in among actual teachers and students to give the movie a realistic feel, things almost feel, well, too real. Reflect on Mr. Guest’s best work, and you see characters stretched to the extreme, caught up in self-made preposterous situations.

Here, nothing seems the least bit stretched or preposterous. In fact, the teachers’ ordeals seem less like comic setups than believable struggles that teachers actually face. Is the gawky new teacher humorously pathetic for screaming at a student who keeps answering his cell phone in class? Is it really all that funny that the administrator must work until 10 p.m. on a nightly basis, telling her husband she can’t be home for dinner?

These scenes are a blend of sad, awkward, emotional, and even heroic on an everyday scale — the sorts of ingredients that would make a powerful drama, if all their reactions and interactions didn’t feel so contrived. While Mr. Akel was no doubt focusing on developing a hand-held camera style that leaves “Chalk” feeling shaky and immediate, what the film really could use is a more efficient editing scheme, one that would help quicken the pulse of so many scenes that lag as actors stretch for what to say next.

On the surface, the mockumentary style seems whimsical enough that anyone could plop a few guys in front of a camera and strike comic gold. But in reality it’s an additional challenge to strip a film of music, editing, and plot devices — all of which serve as connecting tissue. “Chalk” was somehow able to get “Supersize Me” director Morgan Spurlock to sign on as executive producer, but unlike Mr. Spurlock’s inventive, meticulously crafted, and witty exposé on McDonald’s, this film feels unfocused and under-cooked.