Riz Ahmed and Kate Hudson in THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST (IFC Films)

At heart, Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a love affair with America that ends poorly. Adapted from a novel by Mohsin Hamid, the film is framed as an interview between journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liv Schreiber) and a charismatic young professor in Lahore, Pakistan—Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed).

The FBI suspects that the Pakistani-born Changez is a terrorist who’s played a key role in the kidnapping of an American professor. His university has been radicalized, and Changez is known to be popular with many of the most vocal students. Bobby offers Changez a chance to explain, and he takes it, surprising his interviewer with a detailed biography. Through their conversation-turned-interrogation, Nair tries to touch upon the qualities that make America both exciting and revolting to much of the world.

Changez explains that he has always been a lover of America, from playing Western sports as a kid to landing a scholarship to Princeton. With drive and effort, he becomes the typical Wall Street hotshot. He also finds love in a meet-cute that’s a little too cute—a seemingly carefree photographer, Erica (Kate Hudson), snaps his picture while he strolls through Central Park. She just happens to also be his CEO’s niece, and she bumps into him in at an Upper East Side cocktail party some weeks later. Erica holds promise for him, a final act of cultural citizenship through a free-spirited, wealthy American who loves him.

But for Changez, 9/11 was a personal eruption. After being arrested and strip-searched with little cause beyond racial profiling, Changez begins to challenge the world around him that refuses to look past black-and-white boundaries. He grows a beard to dare people to judge him and to confirm his suspicions about their racism. He even starts to find fault with his accomplishments, comparing his newfound self-oriented materialistic values to the problems he sees in American culture.

And Erica is troubled and selfish—one more representation of what Changez loves most in America that becomes an unworthy object of desire, a shiny goal that blinds him from some purer state. Their relationship becomes clumped together with all of the film’s other points about his adopted country, and the combination feels like one more facet of a clumsy, not fully formed argument.

This is a conversation Nair’s returned to many times—Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake all have explored the personal conflicts undergirded by cultural ones. But the points made here lack focus. It’s clear that Changez has been radicalized for very understandable reasons, and Nair asks us to consider how far he has been moved against the West without jumping to conclusions. But beyond simply asking for sympathetic understanding, what value does that question carry? What viewer would disagree?

It’s easy to read Changez’s youthful feelings in the flashbacks but difficult to know what he thinks in the present when he encounters his interviewer in Lahore—Ahmed’s flinty eyes sell both charm and malice. However, his character arc is rich, and his souring affection for America is felt strongly because we have watched his disdain grow from its roots.

Yet even after the biography portion ends, Changez is still an opaque cipher—both to Bobby and the viewer. The movie is least successful at playing “Is he or isn’t he?,” which unfortunately dominates the film’s last hour. Reducing the emotional investment placed in a character by wondering whether or not he has acted on an evil impulse lacks value beyond creating a suspenseful thriller rather than a cultural commentary.