The latest Hunger Games movie hit theaters this weekend, and no other studio in Hollywood was dumb enough to try releasing a film against it. I’ll give my thoughts on that movie when I can be bothered to watch it, preferably when Mockingjay Part 2 is closer to release. For now, it’s time to do some catching up.

Rosewater is mostly known as the passion project of Jon Stewart, who famously took a Daily Show sabbatical at the height of his pop culture influence to craft his directorial debut. Stewart also wrote the film and co-produced alongside EGOT-winning producer Scott Rudin. As for the cast, we’ve got Gael Garcia Bernal, Shoreh Aghdashloo, and those are the better-recognized names in this incredibly talented if low-key cast.

Stewart and his colleagues brought a ton of heat to this movie, and now it’s being positioned as an awards contender. This aggravates me. Not because it’s a bad movie — far from it — but because it could have and should have been better.

Rosewater is based on the true story of Maziar Bahari, played here by Bernal. He’s an Iranian expatriate living in Britain with his pregnant wife (Paola, played by Claire Foy), though his mother (Moloojoon, played by Aghdashloo) still lives in Iran. His father and sister (respectively played by Haluk Bilginer and Golshifteh Farahani) have both long since died in prison, after their political dissidence got them locked away on trumped up charges.

Anyway, Bahari is now the resident Iranian correspondent for Newsweek, and he gets sent to cover the 2009 presidential election. On one side of the election is Ahmadinejad, whose campaign is mostly represented by Amir El-Mazry in the role of Alireza. This guy talks pretty much entirely in talking points, without a single original idea or intellectual argument behind all his rhetoric about the greatness of Iran and how Ahmadinejad must be elected because the Supreme Leader wills it. The other side is represented by Davood (Dimitri Leonidas) and a bunch of other twenty-somethings who will vote for anyone who isn’t Ahmadinejad. They’re so sick and tired of having their voices suppressed by a perceived dictator that they will quite literally fight to the death for their freedoms to speak and vote however they please.

It is a little irritating that this election is oversimplified into a binary choice in which Ahmadinejad’s camp looks like the dark overlords and the other camp looks like a bunch of scrappy righteous underdogs, but the election itself was never the point. The point was to show the Iranians’ frustrations with politics and how closely they mirror ours in America. It makes the very intriguing argument that even though our countries may be at each others’ throats, and though we don’t know enough about each other to realize it, we really do have a surprising amount in common. Even when the Iranian government imposes media blackouts and employs lethal force in putting down demonstrations, it conjures the recent spectre of Ferguson here in the U.S.

(Side note: Yes, I’m aware that Ferguson didn’t happen until well after this film had ceased production. Still, the point stands.)

Getting back to the story, Ahmadinejad wins in a landslide, though there is suspicion that the votes were somehow rigged. Bahari stays behind to cover the riots, he sends some violent footage back to Newsweek, and then some shady government agents show up to arrest him.

Bahari is accused of acting as a spy, sent from the West to sabotage the Iranian government. He also has a family history of political defiance, so that’s considered evidence against him. Oh, and the authorities search his room, charging him with ownership of western entertainment that’s all lumped together under the heading of “porno” even though it’s nothing of the sort.

(Side note: Though the film never mentions it, the real-life Bahari made a student film about the Holocaust. This was presented as evidence of a Zionist connection.)

Perhaps most damning of all, Bahari had recently filmed an interview with Jason Jones of The Daily Show, in which Jones addresses Bahari as a spy. Funnily enough, Jones and Stewart themselves take the opportunity to show the interview being filmed and provide a glimpse of what really goes on behind the scenes of those field reports on The Daily Show. By all appearances, it looks like a lot of fun and Jones is very up front about what he’s doing. Which makes it all the more darkly ludicrous when Bahari has to try and explain that the interview was entirely a joke.

But here’s a twist: Bahari’s interrogators already know that.

We’re explicitly shown that no one seriously believes Bahari to be a spy. However, the authorities do believe that Bahari is a prominent voice against Ahmadinejad’s regime, and his statements could heavily influence international opinion on Iran’s leadership. Thus Javadi (known as “Rosewater” in the book, played by Kim Bodnia) is tasked with getting a televised “confession” out of Bahari by any means necessary, hopefully demoralizing Ahmadinejad’s opposition in the process.

But here’s the big question: Why?

The movie makes so many powerful arguments about how suppressing freedom of speech is a losing battle (especially in the Internet Age), and how anyone with a voice could potentially change the world, but the filmmakers stumble on the point of precisely how free speech can make such a huge difference. After all, the movie makes it explicitly clear that this government is already A-OK with rigging elections, killing its own people, and locking up civilians en masse. These are not the actions of a government that gives a crap about what its people have to say or think.

Furthermore, a crucial part of the narrative is the moment when Bahari is finally let go (pray forgive me for spoiling the outcome of a huge international incident from five years ago). It’s implied that Bahari’s release happened at least partially because his detainment brought attention and condemnation from other countries. But again, the movie never thinks to explain why anyone in the Iranian government would give a fuck. The Iranians already hate the West with a fiery passion, so why would they care what Hillary Clinton has to say? We just go straight from international press to Bahari’s release, with no explanation for how we got from A to B. For narrative and thematic purposes, that’s not going to fly.

The interrogations themselves are also problematic. This film needed to make the onscreen torture just painful enough to register with the audience, but not so painful as to make the audience uncomfortable. That’s a very difficult balance to pull off, and first-timer Stewart doesn’t quite have the chops for it. In fact, it seems like Stewart chose to err on the side of audience comfort, since the worst physical violence happens just out of frame and none of it looks very convincing. This baffles me, due to the nature of the source material. We already know that Bahari will make it out alive after precisely 118 days, and that’s a powerful safety net. The filmmakers had full creative liberty to push into darker, bolder territory, and we the audience would have gone along with it, secure in the knowledge that everything would work out. I’m not saying that Stewart should have gone full 12 Years a Slave, but going just a touch further in that direction might have yielded some far more interesting results.

Then we have “Rosewater” himself. Kim Bodnia does a sterling job with what he was given, but the character is written and directed in a wildly inconsistent way. The filmmakers try to humanize the character in so many different ways, and none of them are developed to the point where it sticks. His family is a key example, as it’s briefly alluded to in one scene and never mentioned again. It also doesn’t help that Javadi presents two different versions of himself, depending on whether he’s talking to his prisoner or his boss. The guy is clearly a very skilled interrogator, but he seems to act like an idiot in the presence of his boss. This begs the question of how smart he really is, which in turn begs the question of whether he really believes all the patriotic bullshit he’s spouting. I couldn’t get a handle on who this character really was and what he really wanted. For such a pivotal character (the namesake of the film, for God’s sake!), that’s a problem.

Of course, it’s not like the film is entirely without merit. Though I have my complaints about the scenes in prison, several editing tricks are utilized to help speed the passage of time in a visually interesting way. Bahari also frequently talks with visions of his dad and his sister, which was a very clever way to spice up the solitary confinement scenes while providing an emotional hook. Elsewhere in the film, Stewart shows a remarkable flair with onscreen graphics, using them to portray the influence of social media in a very nifty way. On a similar note, we get a scene in which Bahari tells us in voice-over about his family history, which is lazy storytelling by any metric. Yet the voice-over is supplemented by visual effects in such a creative way that I was absolutely on board through the whole scene. Also, Stewart shows remarkable prudence with regards to hand-held camerawork, knowing precisely where to use it and why it should (or should not) be used.

Rosewater is certainly not a bad movie, but it was very clearly the work of an inexperienced filmmaker. Jon Stewart shows a basic understanding of how to craft a film (he certainly knows how to fill a cast, if nothing else), but he gets some of the finer details wrong in ways that snowball into prominent flaws. I’d normally suggest that things might have been better if Stewart had merely written and produced without directing, but that wouldn’t have done much good here. No, I think that Stewart needed to sit on this one until he had another film or two under his belt, and then he really could have done it justice.

So much passion is overflowing from every frame that it’s abundantly clear why Jon Stewart and this project needed each other so badly. Moreover, there’s no denying that Stewart is whip-smart, and he sure as hell didn’t craft a movie that fails for being stupid. Put simply, this is a movie that involved a whole bunch of talented people putting in a metric ton of effort. That may not be enough to make a masterpiece, but it’s enough to make a good film.