Starring Billy Crudup. Rated 14A.

In 1971, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo set out to map the effects of role-play on students in a simulated prison experience. The study paid male students $15 a day to pretend to be prisoners or guards. Most chose the former, because everybody hates guards—with some reason, apparently.

Despite verbal anachronisms like “trying to get everyone on the same page”, the film viscerally captures what it was like to be a young American male (muttonchops! reel-to-reel tape recorders!) at the height of the Vietnam War, updated with intimations of Abu Ghraib. This makes the film unpleasant to watch at times, but is creating discomfort itself a sign of moral seriousness?

“We’re trying to do sumpin’ good,” claims Zimbardo, played here, rather monotonously, by Almost Famous “golden god” Billy Crudup. He’s not.

Unlike David Milgram’s study of passive aggression, Zimbardo’s simulation of prison dynamics operated under no real scientific guidelines and yielded little that couldn’t be observed in an actual prison—or, for that matter, in prison movies.

In fact, one of the lead guards (Michael Angarano) here starts imitating Strother Martin’s drawl in Cool Hand Luke. Race and sexuality are subtextually raised, but The Stanford Prison Experiment offers few unfamiliar insights. The well-acted effort tries to sell the notion that Zimbardo’s experiment had a lasting value, but by then we’ve spent more than two hours watching a man gravely compromised by his own cruelty. To quote one of the mock inmates here, “I have to say that this has been a very unsatisfying experience.”