In "The Night Listener," radio show host Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams), who regales his listeners with musings, opinions and true stories, has a humdinger for his latest broadcast -- or thinks he does. In an extended flashback, we get to judge for ourselves.

One of Gabriel's most avid listeners is dying teenager Pete (Rory Culkin), who sends him a startling manuscript about the disease he contracted as a result of unspeakable sexual abuse as a younger child. The perpetrators, according to Pete, were his parents, who forced him to participate in hard-core pornographic films. Gabriel becomes obsessed with finding the boy, who seems particularly elusive -- on the eve of his story being published as a nonfiction book. Gabriel is stymied at every turn by Donna (Toni Collette), Pete's self-appointed guardian who's bound and determined to deny all access to her adopted son.

Williams is persuasive as a broken man with a washed-up love life who needs a mission (Bobby Cannavale plays Jess, his estranged, younger lover). But the movie around him -- which Armistead ("Tales of the City") Maupin co-adapted from his novel -- doesn't seem to have been worth his effort. Aiming to blur the distinctions between truth and illusion, it simply blurs its own effectiveness by relying on predictable and not particularly convincing mystery-thriller formula. Perhaps "Night Listener" would have fared better as a documentary: Maupin's novel mirrored a true story in which Maupin and others were duped into believing the manuscript of a young man.

-- Desson Thomson

Contains sexual material, themes of pedophilia and profanity.