Though it announces right off that it's set in 1999, Freedomland doesn't look back at a particular time or place as much as it recalls its most notorious inspiration. In 1995, Susan Smith was charged and convicted in South Carolina for the previous year's murder of her young children. She was not, however, ever charged for the lie she told: that a black man had stolen her car with the little boys inside, which instigated a media frenzy that included her tearful pleas for their safe return even as she knew they were drowned.

Richard Price wrote the novel Freedomland in 1998, granting voice not only to a Smith-like character, but also to black residents of a New Jersey housing project enraged by a white mother's accusation and worse, the assumption by cops and journalists alike that her incomplete story made sense. In Joe Roth's movie version, this story is briefly granted weight by the fact that it's recited by Julianne Moore. As recovering addict Brenda, Moore is effectively pale and red-eyed, fragile and cagey, and broken enough that you might feel sympathy—for a minute, anyway. She's rendered untrustworthy almost immediately when the detective assigned to pursue her case, one Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson), announces that she's lying.

A NEGRO TOOK MY BABY: Julianne Moore as Freedomland's misdirecting mom.

This is a problem. It's not that you need to believe Brenda, who looks unsteady from the start: She first appears wandering through the Armstrong Projects at night, enfeebled by grief and bloodied by who knows what. Making her way to a medical center, she's engulfed by ER doctors and interviewed by Lorenzo, who learns she has been carjacked and thrown to the ground by a young black man and then, only minutes into the exchange, that her four-year-old son was in the backseat.

Lorenzo launches into a panic, the camera emulating his assaultive questioning of Brenda and his own increasing agitation. As he gasps for air—you learn in this instant that he's asthmatic and his inhaler's empty—Joe Roth's film makes clear its primary mode: poetic bludgeoning. Lorenzo's (asthma) attack is a familiar metaphor, indicating his tetchy efforts to straighten out relations between perennially frustrated project inhabitants and the cops who detest them. At the same time, Brenda's real-enough pain is recast as a sign of her incapacity and worse, her emblematic status. Incarnating distrust and desperation, she's suddenly turned from a character into the gap between truth and meaning.

As such, Brenda is where the film can't make sense. Inexplicably, Lorenzo takes her to the projects that very night, even as the confrontation between residents and police tilts toward violence. This is orchestrated and melodramatic, though the situation is surely likely. Even before Brenda's incident, the film sets up the "unrest" via a few briefly visible speakers (well acted by Clarke Peters, Aunjanue Ellis and Fly Williams III) who pronounce that even when the city does send over refrigerators or laptops, they're unusable due to missing parts or sloppy deliveries. And Lorenzo's own motivational history is delivered in a couple of minutes as, in the middle of the ruckus, he leaves Brenda in her apartment and visits his son (Dorian Missick) in prison (visiting hours are anytime for cops, apparently).

When Lorenzo drags Brenda down to Armstrong again the next morning, his aim is clear. He presses her against an apartment wall, menacing by his sheer size and Jackson's signature ferocity, while she cowers and tears up, blubbering that she can't say any more. Framed from the window, detectives and uniforms "question" witnesses or suspects: The skewed high angle makes the scene, which plays out as repeated pushing and growling, without narrative logic, into a seeming punishment for Brenda. This even as her brother Danny (Ron Eldard), a detective from another precinct, is appearing on a TV conveniently hooked up so Lorenzo can see it as he walks into and out of the projects, issuing a plea to the kidnapper to release his precious nephew.

With a media maelstrom now piled onto the cops-folks enmity, Lorenzo calls in a third team, a child-finding group headed by two very different mothers, hard-faced Karen (Edie Falco) and gently supportive Marie (Latanya Richardson). The group has a system, honed by unfortunate years of practice. To demonstrate, the film booms into symbolic overkill: Accompanied by big music, the searchers arm themselves with water bottles, walking sticks and bug spray, and fan out in a looming crane shot over an area known as "Freedomland," an abandoned children's home where kids were abused for years (to pound this point, the camera picks up little shoes and broken dolls).

And so Freedomland is full of hauntings, institutional and personal, with Brenda burdened at last with speaking some version of "truth." Using language elegiac and perfect and quite unlike her own, Brenda confesses her great sin and the film's great lacuna, a desire for which she pays an impossible price.

Freedomland Directed by Joe Roth A Sony release Opens Friday at area theaters