As the death toll of American troops in Iraq rolls past 4,000, the timing of Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss (Mar. 27) is painfully apt. The writer/director's first film since Boys Don't Cry (1999) follows Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) as he returns home from a tour of duty in Iraq, only to be thwarted by the back-door draft policy that has forced more than 80,000 military personnel back into service after their military contracts expired.

Beyond the film's battlefield backdrop, there seems to be a civil war being fought with Stop-Loss itself. Moments of authenticity, like the cannily organic moment Sgt. King goes AWOL, or the frame-by-frame perfection of any scene featuring poor doomed soldier Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), are interrupted by sentimental and disconcerting schlock. As Sgt. King ambles from Texas to D.C. seeking senatorial assistance with his best friend's fiancé Michele (Abbie Cornish), the pair stop along the way to do good deeds and execute a little well-intentioned vigilante justice. Michele to King, after one such detour: "That was a good thing, what you did back there." They seem too unlike a fugitive and his moll.

Stop-Loss' hat tricks read rusty and dated. The disembodied smattering of grainy, soldier-shot video (which one of them is supposed to be behind the camera again?) looks like Dick Cheney's turn at directing an Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. And the corresponding crude hand-written captions smack of the 1990s. The sole combat scene on a narrow residential street early in the film, while effectively graphic, feels too much like a video game.

Peirce is necessarily and understandably conflicted. She borrows from her brother's personal experiences as a young, post 9-11 Army recruit to tell the story of Sgt. King and his troubled compatriots, resulting in an end product that Peirce admits is pro-soldier. But her prior indie-film sensibilities afford her characters the brutality (bar-room brawls, bedroom brawls, and one fine kick-ass back-alley ass-kicking) and criminal carelessness (multiple DUIs) central to any flawed hero. She seems unsure what to do with King from moment to moment, and the ending could have only been less satisfying had there been no real resolution. A kind of lo-cal Sadr City, Stop-Loss offers all the frustration and inconclusiveness of the war it documents, without the horrific body count.