Starring Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Rating unavailable.

It’s an image of a time and a place in Africa you rarely see: a glamorous garden party in Lagos, circa independence day 1960, with women in mod wigs and floral shifts mixing with those in tribal prints and headdresses as a jazz band plays. That’s the starting point for Half of a Yellow Sun, which goes on to depict a love affair between two Nigerian intellectuals just before the country gets torn apart by the Biafran War. Star Thandie Newton is elegant Olanna, just back from getting her education abroad—an aspiring sociology prof in love with the revolutionary academic Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor from 12 Years a Slave). She and Odenigbo have a tumultuous relationship and refuse to get married. In fact, Olanna is so modern that Odenigbo’s traditional mother is convinced she’s a witch.

Director Biyi Bandele surrounds them all with teak-furnished modernist apartments and a sweeping African-orchestral soundtrack. It’s a lushly shot trip into a lost era—all the more fascinating because most of what we hear about Nigeria these days surrounds the atrocities of the backward-thinking Boko Haram.

Unfortunately, in this rendition of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s sprawling book of the same name, Bandele focuses too closely on the melodrama between Odenigbo, Olanna, her twin sister Kainine, and Kainine’s white husband Richard (Joseph Mawle). The result is that the politics and deep-set tribal conflicts in postcolonial Nigeria become confusing back story; when bombs and machete-wielding gangs suddenly start driving the characters out of their cushy homes and militants start mowing people down at airports, it’s chaotic and comes out of nowhere.

Still, the film and its acting are heartfelt, and it’s a story that needs to be told. Bandele does capture some of the deeper points of the book, including the tension between the modern and the traditional, and the pulling apart of the twin sisters as a metaphor for the country’s civil war. But too often, Half of a Yellow Sun substitutes soap-opera scripting for the sweep of Adichie’s complex novel, making it that rare film that needs more politics and less passion.