"Let's talk about Hitler," says Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), voicing one of several creaky bits of dialogue in writer-director James Vanderbilt's new World War II drama, "Nuremberg." Kelley is a U.S. Army psychiatrist chatting up a new client, the cunning, froglike Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), founder of the Nazi Gestapo and currently imprisoned in a cell block at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. The time is six months after the 1945 German surrender that brought an end to the War in Europe, and Goering, recently captured along with a large trove of drugs (he was a longtime morphine addict), now needs to be psychologically cleared to stand trial along with 21 other Nazi bigwigs. It's to be an international proceeding — an unprecedented big deal. In the view of the prosecuting powers — England, France, the Soviet Union and the United States — Goering and his associates are all guilty of crimes against humanity in the deaths of multiple millions of people. In Goering's telling, he wasn't entirely aware of what was going on.

Some extraordinary movies have been made about the Nazi period (think only of "Schindler's List"). But the hideous history of the Nazi blight — especially when accompanied, as it is here, by contemporaneous file footage of skeletal corpses being bulldozed into mass graves — can also be an uncomfortable fit for an Oscar-bait Hollywood movie. This was already a problem in the 1961 "Judgment at Nuremberg" ("an all-star concentration-camp drama," one reviewer observed), which actually did win a number of awards. Now, in "Nuremberg," it's even more awkward.

The movie's central problem is its nominal star, Malek, who plays psychiatrist Kelley as a sort of Goering fanboy, grinning and solicitous and willing to illicitly transport the man's personal letters out of the prison to his wife (Lotte Verbeek). (Frau Goering could pass for a breezy mom from a '50s TV sitcom — "He likes you," she tells Kelley after reading her husband's letter.) Kelley is such a dunderhead you wonder why anyone would ever place confidence in him. When he lets slip to a pretty female correspondent that he has an inside track on what's happening behind the scenes of the upcoming trial, she says, "Why don't you tell me all about it" — and the next thing we see is an on-the-nose newspaper headline: "Doc Tells All."

Kelley quickly starts alienating his superiors: Chief Prosecutor Jackson (Michael Shannon); prison commandant Colonel Andrus (John Slattery); and sneery fellow medico Gustave Gilbert (Colin Hanks). Even his trusty translator, a young sergeant called Howie Triest (Leo Woodall, of "The White Lotus"), soon has his number. (Woodall also anchors the picture's most moving scene, which comes toward the end.)

The story is inevitably constructed in such a way that the two principals — Malek's Kelley and Crowe's Goering — are both unsympathetic and, in the case of Malek's character, not even very interesting. (There's a plot-gotcha at the end, but Kelley has nothing to do with it.) Crowe, now in the golden years of a career filled with fine performances and memorable characters, does what he can with the thin role of Goering, but most of his screen time — apart from an occasional cute line ("I am the book, you are merely the footnote") — is spent lounging in a cell looking morbidly obese. (Let's hope some of the extra weight we see distending his uniform was prosthetic.)

A built-in problem with a movie about people concerned with momentous events in their past — events that we never see — is a lack of action and an overabundance of talk. Not that action is a requirement for conveying the horror of the Nazi period — see Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest" or the haunting German film "Sophie Scholl — The Final Days."

Vanderbilt's script also makes an ill-judged stretch for contemporary resonance. It comes toward the movie's conclusion, when Kelley is asked whether the Nazis were a one-of-a-kind abomination. "You know what separates them from us?" Kelley asks. "Nothing." A dunderhead to the end.

Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics