Gael García Bernal in Rosewater (Open Road)

Jon Stewart’s directorial debut has been highly anticipated for well over a year. Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay, took the summer of 2013 off to shoot the film on location in Jordan, handing The Daily Show hosting duties to John Oliver.

Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari, who has been a regular guest on Stewart’s comedy show for years, was born in Tehran and educated in the West, where he married and built a writing career that was appropriately critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime. On screen, Bahari (Gael García Bernal) leaves his pregnant wife to cover the important 2009 election in Iran, as the populist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi poses a real threat to the incumbent Ahamdinejad.

The first quarter or so of Rosewater, with Bahari trotting around Tehran interviewing people about the upcoming election and making friends, is the most engaging. Stewart excels in his evident goal of pointing out how similar Iranians are to their Western counterparts. As a filmmaker, Stewart shines in balancing the extreme gravity of their political situation with the lightness and ease of regular people enjoying their daily lives.

Bahari’s companion, Davood (Dimitri Leonidas), a young man-about-town who poses as, among other things, a taxi driver, adds a vital, and perhaps singular, sense of fun to this otherwise serious film. Davood introduces Bahari to Mousavi supporters who are fans of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and pirating TV shows through their illicit satellite dishes.

Unfortunately, though necessary because of  Bahari’s life story, these appealing characters vanish after Bahari’s arrest for filming soldiers firing at student protesting what was widely perceived as a rigged election. The square where the shooting occurred was filled with security cameras, so the government had footage of Bahari at the incident. Paired with his long history of criticizing Ahmadinejad, this was enough to bring the secret police to his door. From then on, it’s a very different film.

To dilute the monotony of a movie set primarily inside a tiny prison cell with one inmate, Stewart uses the trick of having Bahari’s father, Baba Akbar (Haluk Bilginer), who died in an Iranian prison for his communist beliefs in the 1950s, appear in hallucinations to talk his son through his ordeal. These exchanges need to ring true for the film to be a bearable viewing experience, and they certainly do.

All the actors deliver excellent performances, and Bilginer, in particular, really impresses in his sensitive, good-natured exchanges with his tormented son. If there’s one takeaway from Rosewater, it’s Stewart’s skill in drawing out great performances from his actors.

The film’s title refers to the “specialist” who is Bahari’s primary human contact during his 118-day imprisonment, a man only identified as “Rosewater.” Aside from the rather obvious points about the sanctity of the journalistic act of “bearing witness,” the film’s real thesis is the banality of evil, as embodied through the specialist, Rosewater (Kim Bodnia). Bodnia gives a compelling performance as the interrogator tasked with enforcing the corrupt, willfully ignorant rule of Ahmadinejad’s regime. Unlike Winston Smith’s omniscient, confident interrogator O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984, Rosewater is an oafish, bumbling brute of a man.

Through Bodnia’s performance as Rosewater, viewers get a strong sense of how truly confused the Iranian state is, intent on preserving the legacy of the Ayatollah’s revolution, yet unable to appreciate that further development is needed. Rosewater is a human avatar for the tension inherent in having a conservative theocracy, led by someone literally called a Supreme Leader, controlling a huge nation filled with a modern population.

Rosewater’s objective is to force the intelligent Bahari to admit that he is a spy, rather than a journalist, since the truth that Bahari chronicled  is unacceptable, namely that the regime fires upon student protestors. It is an uncomfortable, awkward goal, getting a man to agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Rosewater dramatizes in moving fashion that a state built on the necessity of this type of equation cannot endure; logic will eventually triumph.

It is certainly not an entertaining film, nor is it intended to be. But for someone who is, by Stewart’s own admission, primarily a comedic entertainer, one would expect perhaps a bit more in the way of entertainment. The old line about comedians who go on the Bill Maher show being very serious and serious journalists/politicians opting for silliness on The Daily Show holds true. People want to downplay the skill that got them in the room in the first place, to show that they are more. We already knew that Stewart was a lot more than a comedian, so he could’ve eased up on the seriousness and allowed more charm to seep through.

There are maybe three or four moderate laughs throughout. The main comedic through line is some humorous scenes where Bahari ironically plays up his image as a lecherous man corrupted by the West for Rosewater’s appeasement. There is a fitting dig at Newsweek‘s irrelevance that drew a big laugh at my screening and an inside baseball look at one of Bahari’s many appearances on Stewart’s show.

What are Bahari’s ideals and what are Stewart’s, other than a vague notion that “bearing witness” is sacrosanct? Bahari learns that being pragmatic is better than unwavering fidelity to ideals—he can do more good outside of prison than he can dying in one. Rosewater‘s big political message may be unexciting, but that is the point—politics should be unexciting. If we want to build a better global community, we have to learn to compromise. Ironclad ideals are outdated.