The reality that the American public has little appetite for Iraq-themed films is old news by now. And yet it still seems deeply ironic that in the midst of a presidential campaign in which that war is second only to the economy as a hot button issue, yet another such film is in the process of tanking.

The uninspiring box office results for Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss--the film, which cost about $25 million to make, generated just $4.5 million in its opening weekend in about 1300 theaters--only deepens the irony. The practice referred to in the title--essentially conscripting solders back into active duty even though they've served their first (often perilous and emotionally damaging) tour--has been called "a back-door draft". Whatever one makes of "the surge" in boots on the ground--which even some war critics had found helpful until the recent explosion in street violence--it probably couldn't have been executed without the stop-loss provision. (Which, the military is quick to point out, is legitimately outlined in every soldier's contract.)

What Stop-Loss considers, often subtly and at times a bit ham-handedly, is the human cost back home. The stop-lossing of Staff Sergeant Brandon King (actor Ryan Philippe is generally impressive as the film's hero) sets up the tale's road-trip scenario as he takes off in the company of his best buddy's girlfriend (the still-maturing but masterful Aussie Abbie Cornish) to seek help from his Congressman. The spoiler at the end of this sentence is that he will fail, which is what makes this film an apt bookend to tragedian Peirce's 1999 Boys Don't Cry. The director's younger brother himself enlisted and landed in the war zone, which only confirmed her earlier fascination with the lives these under-recognized and little-thanked patriots are living--or losing.

Having steeped herself in the troops' own handmade videos of grunt life, death, and boredom, Peirce aims to probe their fierce camaraderie. Her film really concentrates less on the issue of stop-loss and more on showing us the flesh-and-blood impact that post-traumatic stress, in various permutations, has on her emblematic trio of soldiers. (Highly touted newcomer Channing Tatum and the film's secret weapon, Joseph Gordon Levitt, are both sterling in their roles alongside Phillippe.)

Much has been made of the sponsoring studio's efforts to dress Stop-Loss up for marketing as a kind of coming-of-age story. (When this writer asked for some still pictures that would show aspects of the film's agonizing, opening battle sequence, the better to illustrate certain insights from an interview with its military consultant, retired Sgt., Major James Dever, the request was quietly tabled.)

So, rate the marketing as somewhere in between desperate and deceitful--albeit in a good cause. What isn't immediately clear from a few quick cuts in the trailer is how the film delivers an array of gritty and even pulpy action-movie moments. The alleyway battle is convincing and suitably nerve-wracking; back home, when a battle-rattled King snaps off a rifle shot to kill a rattler, or takes on a whole gang who have gotten the drop on him, Peirce nimbly shucks off her indie-goddess reserve and gives us something from a Steve McQueen (or is it Steven Seagal?) movie. Even Abbie Cornish's character, who at one level can be seen as a fetchingly perspiring blonde on the run with a buff young dude in a muscle car, is an action-ready good ol' Texas gal--a pretty fair hand popping a magazine out of a Glock or knocking back a row of tequila shots. This push-pull is probably what led Variety's Joe Leydon to describe the film as "A wildly uneven drama, by turns sincere and synthetic." By contrast, it's won rave reviews in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, where David Denby called it "forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war."

As hinted at in a number of reviews, notably from the New York Times' A.O. Scott,

Ms. Peirce's movie, which she wrote with Mark Richard, is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions.... Instead of high-minded indignation or sorrow, it runs on earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage.

Taking charge of the soldierly sequences--and this is first and foremost, as co-producer Greg Goodman notes, "a film about solders"--is Sgt. Major (Retired) James Dever, who spent over two decades in trouble spots as a Force Recon marine. He was the military consultant who guided Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (in which Phillippe played a Navy corpsman) as well as The Last Samurai, Jarhead, and Stop-Loss's the-war-at-home cousin in disappointing box office, Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah.

Dever recounted for me the moment in Morocco, in a hectic house-to-house gun battle staged in a slum area on the outskirts of Marrakech, when his actor charges were to react to the sudden, blood-spattering wound through the neck one character takes. (The character who has a small speaking part, is s played by a real-life Iraq veteran who's part of Dever's team.) In the screening room where I saw the film, the audience of about forty let out a collective cry of alarm when it happened, "I told them, when you got a man down, you've got to keep fighting, or the rest of you will die."

Dever's training regimen wasn't much different from what's become the familiar formula for Hollywood--isolate the trouper troops (in this case, in a tent encampment at the still-standing set for The Alamo outside Austin Texas), wake them in the dark (5:30, a good 90 minutes before dawn), "P.T" them with calisthenics and a run, and only then provide a shower, shave and chow, followed by and training--in this case, in weapons handling and close quarters battle, or CQB. Dever had the squad leader, Phillippe, boss them around ("You're not gonna be their buddy right now," Dever told him.) On the final night, Phillippe et al were awakened at 3 a.m. to stage a mock assault on a building without instructors.

Paramount and Peirce began in a rush of hope--she told a Rotten Tomatoes interviewer that the studio was high on the film:

I sold it as a spec, greenlit screenplay, to Paramount with Scott Rudin. And when I was ... screening it during editing, the studio saw it and they were very excited because it was a commercial movie. It appealed to young and old, men and women. MTV is part of Viacom and they felt it was wonderful because it applied to their audience.

But by catering directly to the interests of twentysomething moviegoers (that is, by fixating on the movie stars' physiques and personal chemistry) and deliberately de-emphasizing "Stop-Loss' " second Gulf War pedigree, marketers for its distributor Paramount hope to avoid the fate shared by other recent Iraq war-related movies -- "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition," "Redacted," "No End in Sight" and "The Kingdom," which all tanked at the box office.

With 21 (in which the smartest guy at M.I.T. hides hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in his ceiling panels--really?) still stomping around like a box-office gorilla, and the demo-swallowing Leatherheads and The Ruins opening this weekend on 2,700 and 2,500 screens respectively, it's hard to like Stop-Loss' prospects. As Goodman says, "This was really risky material. It's not doing what we would have liked at the box office but time can be a friend to a movie like this." In dog years--say, when we still have troops in the region in a hundred years--he's no doubt right. Americans may catch up one day to what its tattered soldiery gave up with very little complaint (it's seemingly up to the artists, from Michael Moore to Peirce and the other bold filmmakers, to do that). Meanwhile on the MTV site where Stop-Loss is promoted, the unnamed spokesman for a real-life group of stop-loss captives has raised a cry:

I represent a unit called 3/509th Airborne Infantry stationed out of Fort Richardson, Alaska.

I realized when I signed up back in July '04 that inevitably I would serve in Iraq and that it would be the longest year of my life. I found out back in April '07 that my unit would be extended by an additional 90 days. We carried on with the mission without complaint and did precisely what was asked of us... Home at that moment seemed even more distant and the possibility of seeing wives, children, mom and dad seemed bleak at best.

We arrived back from a long and drawn out deployment in November '07 with 8 less men (just my company) than when we left. The unit altogether suffered the greatest number of KIA's than any other unit serving during that 14 month period. We paid dearly both in the physical and mental realm and some men paid the greatest cost. ...[after] a month of being back from post deployment leave those with ETS [Expiration Term of Service, or retirement] dates later than October 1st were informed that they would be stop loss and that by or around February '09 we would be heading back to another hot spot in the world, Afghanistan, for another 12 month deployment.

The movie we feel will go a long way in defining for audiences the precise agony and disgust we are all feeling about this.

Your characters are as real as the air you breathe, Ms. Peirce, and they number not just in the hundreds but thousands.

Barring some unforeseen spike in its popularity--perhaps on some game-changing pronouncement from a White House which (until it's speared by news reports about execrable V.A. hospitals or some other news story) has been deaf, dumb and blind to the miseries of what most Americans, in polls, regard as a misbegotten war--Stop Loss seems relegated to an obscure position in any national debate. But we may look back on it over time and give it credit for what's been pointed out by critics like the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle:

Clearly, Peirce's motives are pure. She's not using the 'stop-loss' issue as a wedge to make the government or the administration look bad. She's using it to dramatize an injustice and to advocate on behalf of the soldiers.

"I was doing this way before any of these other movies were on the map," Peirce told Rotten Tomatoes, " I'm thinking about the soldiers and their experiences."

Goodman, who began as a set p.a. fetching coffee and came up through the ranks working with pal David O. Russell, finds any number of reasons why Russell's 1999's Three Kings, which he also co-produced, made $108 million in the U.S.:

The big difference with this and Three Kings is, we told the story about a war that had already been over for seven years; that gave us all enough distance to have a little bit of wisdom. It's hard to make a movie about a current war. Look at he Vietnam movies I remember so well, most of them happened three or four years after the war was over in 1975. Coming Home and Deerhunter in 1978 and Apocalypse Now was 1979.

I think in the time between when we went out and made the movie [in 2006] and now, when the fact emerged that movies about the current Iraq war, as a genre, are not resonating with audiences--that's something no one would have known when we got this movie greenlit.

Also I think this movie is, as we're seeing, an innately tough sell. It's very had to get people who see [the war] in the news everyday to go ahead and plunk down twelve dollars to go and see it in a theater. Whether I agree 100 percent with the particular strategy Paramount employed, I think they were trying very hard to get people in there.

It's not a war movie, it's a movie about soldiers.

I think that's the tricky part, telling a fully fleshed story about real people. A movie about the war can't just become a polemic, it has to be about flesh and blood people and that's where I think Kimberly particularly succeeded-- bringing these guys alive.

Goodman echoes a thesis that's been heard from other quarters when he notes that in cloaking much of the war from the American public, the administration as isolated the awareness to those most affected--the 4,000-plus killed, the 20,000-plus wounded, the many tens of thousands whose lives have been turned upside down, and their families:

Other than the characters in Stop Loss and characters in In The Valley of Elah or any of in these films, the rest of us aren't being asked to sacrifice anything-- except maybe now we are with the economy.

Goodman notes how the movie's oddly disturbing final moments--the men with whom we've grown familiar sitting on a bus and bound for the flight back to the war zone--emphasizes the painfully self-sacrificial grit that keeps the system going:

These guys aren't an underclass-- they made a choice to do this. They weren't guys who were bereft of options; they were guys who believed in their country and that's what makes the film so powerful, especially the end of the film. [Sgt. King's] his choice transcends the politics of George Bush or why we're in the war. It hearkens back to the core values that he has as a Texan and as a brother to his compatriots. And that's what's devastating to me about the film; that those underlying values that are so powerful and are being kind of taken advantage of for a meaningless war.

(Abbie Cornish and Ryan Philippe, on the run in Stop-Loss, stop to down some shots.)