Starring Jonah Hill and James Franco. Rated 14A.

In early 2002, Christian Longo was extradited from Mexico for having murdered his wife and three small children in coastal Oregon. He’d been travelling as Michael Finkel, the name of a top New York Times reporter who had just been fired for fabricating a story for the Times Sunday magazine. The real Finkel became an instant media pariah, but his eventual meeting and journalistic collaboration with Longo offered both career redemption and a drop-chute to the lower reaches of hell.

Partially based on Finkel’s memoir, True Story sticks closer to its origins than do most real-life movies, and those facts are compellingly creepy. So why’s this one so boring? It must come down to choices made by writer-director Rupert Goold, a British-TV veteran making his film debut for Brad Pitt’s production company.

Jonah Hill here continues his Moneyball transition into Serious Actor, providing most of the film’s moral tension. James Franco takes his bland-enigma thing too far as Longo, and the character remains beyond reach. Felicity Jones goes American as Finkel’s long-time girlfriend, University of Montana professor Jill Barker, although the role largely consists of padding about their gorgeous, snowbound cabin, looking quietly revolted by her partner’s growing involvement with a soft-spoken psychopath.

Perhaps as compensation, the novice filmmaker invents a last-act scene in which Jill visits Longo in prison and reads him the riot act. Apologies to the truth, but the rest of the gloomily shot movie needed that kind of theatrical imagination, because once the who’s-using-whom? dynamic sets in, Goold keeps hitting the same notes again and again. Secondary characters, like an Oregon detective (Robert John Burke), show up occasionally to elucidate doppelgänger themes already obvious from the start—and to anyone who’s read Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer or other books on the subject of overidentification. Because there are so few elements in play, that leaves plenty of time for slo-mo home movies and other repetitive devices that make this Story more ordinary than true.