The recent trend of movies set in the past but still within living memory is a natural effort to find out how the hell we got here, but I discern another underlying motive: to show life before social media and the primacy of cellphones in daily life. Directors are still struggling with the task of filming the digital world, whereas analog media, which depend on face-to-face action and interpersonal decision-making, are ready-made for movies. Gus Van Sant’s new crime drama, “Dead Man’s Wire,” is based on an incident from 1977, in which an Indianapolis man took hostage an executive at a mortgage company to which he owed money. Because part of this saga unfolded in front of TV cameras, Van Sant’s film is also a story of media—its role in delivering news, in deciding what constitutes news in the first place, and in serving as an echo chamber for attention-seekers who are precisely trying to make news.

The movie opens one Tuesday morning in February, with a suave-voiced, lyrically aphoristic d.j., Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), waxing cool on the airwaves—even as his casual riff, “Joker, joker, joker,” hints at a crisis that’s brewing in the mind of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), a fan of the show, who has tuned in while driving. A socially awkward man in early middle age, he’s on his way to the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company. But something seems off. Tony is flustered to learn that he’ll be meeting not with the firm’s boss but with the boss’s son, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), who is also a Meridian executive. Tony looks a little strange, too—one arm is in a sling and in his other he carries a long, thin, and battered box. Someone should have peeked in, because when Richard ushers Tony into an office upstairs, Tony draws a pistol from the sling, handcuffs Richard, and takes a sawed-off shotgun from the box. He wires the shotgun to the back of Richard’s neck and to his own body. This is the “dead man’s wire” of the title, and it insures that if Richard tries to flee or Tony is caught or killed, Richard will be shot in the head.

Tony is a man of grievance. His story is a bit tangled, but what emerges is that Meridian holds the mortgage on some property that he bought in the hope of leasing it to a shopping-mall developer. He believes that Meridian knowingly coaxed the developer to build elsewhere, on a tract of land that the company itself had an interest in—thus sticking Tony with a mortgage while depriving him of the income to pay it. The person Tony blames isn’t Richard but Richard’s father, M. L. Hall (Al Pacino) who’s seen sitting at poolside, in Florida, at arrogant leisure, humiliating a waiter who brings his breakfast. But, with M. L. unavailable, Tony takes Richard hostage instead and demands an apology from M. L. and a payment of five million dollars.

Tony’s plans are meticulous, but he proves to be, so to speak, a gifted improviser, and he essentially summons his collaborators: he makes Richard call 911 and tell the authorities what’s happening, and then gets on the phone himself to explain how the dead man’s wire works. When the police quickly show up, as Tony clearly expected, he parades Richard through the lobby, out of the building, and into the street. The police follow closely but do nothing, even when Tony “borrows” a police car to drive off to the apartment complex where he lives and hole up there with his hostage. Everywhere he goes, he’s followed not only by police but also by a gaggle of reporters, something that Van Sant emphasizes with inserts of black-and-white newspaper photographs of the events and clips of the TV news coverage.

The film draws a link between these journalistic versions and the unfolding action through the character of Linda Page (Myha’la), a TV reporter on the scene outside the office building. When her station prepares to dispatch another reporter to Tony’s apartment complex, she’s annoyed. She knows the place well and feels it’s her story, so, when a producer asks her for the address, she rebuffs him and heads over herself, with a cameraman in tow. (Her diligent and alert reporting is contrasted with the on-air bloviation of peacocking anchormen.) But the media presence looming largest throughout is Fred, the d.j. from the opening of the movie.

As a fan of Fred’s show, Tony is desperate for attention from Fred and his audience. For him, it seems at least as important as the money. By putting Fred at the start of the film, Van Sant hints that his presence won’t be merely atmospheric. Sure enough, after Tony calls in and demands to go on the air with Fred, the d.j.’s urbane personality and quick thinking have real consequences; Fred puts his easygoing spontaneity to a high-stakes test by trying to mollify Tony and buy time to thwart his dangerous plan.

There’s an enticing story in “Dead Man’s Wire” that remains latent, about the ever-thickening intellectual and technical infrastructure of law enforcement in civil society. Van Sant emphasizes the legal considerations and the law-enforcement strategies involved in engaging with a hostage-taker, as station executives nervously game out responsibility and liability. Watching the d.j. heroically improvising in an attempt to keep Tony calm, I envisioned a straight line from those improvisations to the crafting of protocols, and, from there, to today’s ubiquitous facial-recognition technology in public places. Unfortunately, the film only hints at its larger ambitions and leaves them undeveloped. The story is told mainly methodically, sometimes deftly, but with little verve, relying on a generalized sensitivity that never approaches imaginative curiosity. It holds attention as a yarn but doesn’t build the incidents of its plot into a world view.

Part of the problem is that far too much time is spent sticking close to Tony and Richard in Tony’s apartment and focussing on the tense maneuvers of their relationship. Tony tries to be a good host, mounting a bizarre effort to befriend a man he has tied to a chair and is threatening to kill. He sincerely wants to be liked by his hostage and seems moved to take the conversation into ever more intimate realms of confession. Questioning Richard about his family life, he discloses that he himself has none—no partner, he says, and his businesses are his children. His strange and desperate effort to connect emotionally with Richard suggests a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome, a quest to win the approval and the friendship of a hostage whom he blames for his misfortunes.

Tony isn’t a total loner—he’s described, in news interviews, as friendly and neighborly—but he is nonetheless alone with his money troubles and with his grievances. What he wants, above all, is validation—the acknowledgment that his cause is just and that his rage is legitimate. He wants to hear it from Richard, he wants to hear it from M. L., and he wants to hear it from the world at large. That’s why he demands to take his case to television, with a live press conference held while still standing behind Richard and wired to him and the shotgun. His allegations about Meridian’s nefarious dealings, including a scheme he calls “a private-equity trap,” are, if not totally unhinged, hinged rather loosely. Their essence is a sense of a generalized victimhood. In his mind, his quest to speak out, in the widest of forums, is a public service. “I’m a goddam national hero,” he declares.

Crime and insanity mesh in heedlessness and ruthlessness. There are actions so destructive, or self-destructive, as to make the perpetrators seem inherently delusional—however rationally those actions have been planned and executed. But what of their motivating principle? That’s the paradox at the heart of “Dead Man’s Wire”: whether Tony’s jaundiced view of Meridian’s business and of society at large are well founded or delusional, too. Van Sant does his best to fudge the issue, but he leaves the fracture plainly visible at the end of the movie, when he shows clips of the real-life Tony Kiritsis from the actual event. Born in 1932, Kiritsis looks every day of his forty-four years—thick and jowly, with oddly sharpened sideburns suggesting a terminal squareness—and his gaze, wild-eyed, looks possessed. (Van Sant’s movie is based in part on a 2018 documentary, “Dead Man’s Line,” by Alan Berry and Mark Enochs, who are consultants on the new film.) It doesn’t take more than a glance at the real-life Kiritsis, or a listen to his voice in a real-life radio tape, to recognize a perpetrator who’s trapped in an inner world of his own. (Meanwhile the real-life radio host, Fred Heckman, is plainspoken and folksy, not at all hip or suave.) By making Tony younger and keener, bright-eyed and calmer, Van Sant tries to sanewash Tony as far as possible; the effect is to nudge the protagonist’s grievance toward legitimacy and to generalize it as frustration at unchecked, inhumane corporate authority. A slightly firmer nudge and “Dead Man’s Wire” would have been a Mangione movie.

But the movie’s tight focus on the sixty-three hours of Tony’s furious spree sacrifices any chance of a fuller view of his personality, his thoughts, his imaginings. Its treatment of the media-world subplot is both too little and too much, leaving Tony defined mainly as an action figure. The narrow focus on the hostage-captor relationship makes the media story that’s essential to that bond seem merely anecdotal. In trying to serve as three films at once, “Dead Man’s Wire” remains both overcooked and underdone. ♦