Given how movie-friendly Southern novelist Harry Crews’s muscular prose often feels in the reading, it’s surprising that more of the author’s uncompromisingly two-fisted and poetically lurid books haven’t reached the screen. With a cast headed by Paul Giamatti, Michelle Williams, and Michael Pitt, “The Hawk Is Dying,” adapted by Florida native Julian Goldberger, would initially appear to be a promising new entry into the frustratingly small Crews movie oeuvre.

George Gatling (Mr. Giamatti) runs a small auto upholstery business in the central Florida college town of Gainesville. Though unmarried, George is a family man of sorts; he shares his home with his sister, Precious (Rusty Schwimmer) and his autistic nephew Fred (Mr. Pitt). But George’s true passion is for falconry, an ancient art that he has yet to master. A hawk’s temperament is pathologically resistant to training, we’re told, and every bird that George has captured has stubbornly refused to eat and eventually died.

As dogged and obsessed about training a bird of prey as he is loosely connected to every other aspect of his life, George refuses to give up. With Fred at his side, George successfully traps a red tailed hawk, a step up from the smaller and less hearty sparrow hawks he’s previously wound up burying in the yard. Inspired by the wild beauty of his new charge, George realizes that the only way to tame his unwilling pupil is to go without food or sleep himself until either he or the hawk gives in.

The hawk’s arrival unfortunately heralds a family tragedy of devastating proportions. Man and bird’s test of wills coincides with a personal ordeal that tries George’s sanity and threatens to destroy him. During the course of a day and a night, the difference between grief-stricken George’s agonized bereavement at his loss and the hawk’s unrelenting inbred resistance to subjugation begins to blur.

Mr. Giamatti literally wears the film’s heart on his sleeve. In unrelentingly tight handheld close-ups, he agonizes as the bird perches on his arm, pecks, flaps, shies, and balks. Together they sulk and shriek indoors, prowl through off-road Florida scrub, and drive through neon-lit strip-mall Gainesville-after-dark for the bulk of the film’s 106 minutes.

“What is the hawk?” asks a minister who, like the rest of George’s friends and family, wants George to let both the bird and the past go. In Mr. Crews’s novel, the bird is a symbol of the brutal randomness of nature, of fate, of grace, and of redemption. Sadly, in Mr. Goldberger’s film the hawk is just a bird. Despite a clear timeline, George’s tragic circumstances, and his evident emotional and spiritual vacuum, the film doesn’t engage at a character level. Instead, “The Hawk Is Dying” makes due with a progression of spectacular but unfocused emotional riffs and explosions performed by Mr. Giamatti. Though he acts with conviction, Mr. Giamatti is unable to breathe three-dimensional life into a character that seems to have been irreparably and fatally underwritten somewhere in its journey from novel to script.

Ms. Williams is as gifted and reliable a performer as Mr. Giamatti. But as Betty, a vaguely outlined slumming psychology student, she too is burdened with the unfortunate task of using a character that says and does things for no consistent dramatic or thematic reason as a tool for telling a story. As Jen on UPN’s “Dawson’s Creek,” Ms. Williams worked artistic miracles on a weekly basis by extracting a palpable inner life from a character that, in less talented hands, would have been as clichéd as the rest of that show. In “The Hawk Is Dying,” she doesn’t stand a chance. In the absence of any but the most perfunctory scripted character definition, she appears to fall back on the kind of flailing emotive generalities used in acting workshops.

There’s a great movie in Harry Crews’s “The Hawk Is Dying,” but this isn’t it. Mr. Goldberger’s version is a film that showcases its director’s cinematic shortcomings, not Mr. Crews’s characteristic white-trash gothic excesses.