"Freedomland" is that saddest of all things in the cinema: a great story poorly told.

Adapted by the novelist Richard Price from his best-selling 1998 novel of the same name, "Freedomland" has grit, realism and epic sweep, its story of a grievous episode in the housing projects and blue-collar suburbs taking on the mythic heft of a Bruce Springsteen ballad.

Police detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson) and Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) are classic Price characters, at once messily human and iconic. As "Freedomland" opens, Council is walking his beat in the Armstrong housing project, where he is affectionately called "Big Daddy" by the mostly African American residents. Simultaneously Brenda, her hands covered in blood, shows up at an emergency room in nearby Gannon, N.J., a mostly white working-class enclave. Her car has been hijacked near the Armstrong projects, and Council is called to interview her.

Brenda identifies the carjacker as a black man, and the police immediately cordon off the projects; meanwhile, Brenda tearfully admits to Council that her 4-year-old son was in the back seat of the car, a late-emerging fact that sparks the detective's doubts in her story. As the manhunt continues, with the Armstrong community becoming increasingly incensed, Council quietly pursues his theory that Brenda isn't telling him the whole story.

In "Freedomland," what starts out looking like just another ripped-from-the-headlines story becomes much more complex. This would have made a fascinating film if "Freedomland" were one movie. Instead, it turns into several movies, none fully realized. What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.

"Freedomland" is the kind of movie that viewers will want to talk about once they've left the theater -- not to discuss the provocative political issues it tries to engage, but to wonder whether the filmmaker might have made a great movie instead of several mediocre ones.

-- Ann Hornaday

Contains profanity and violent content.