The films of Luca Guadagnino tend to be so rapturously received, critical opinion will soon reach the reverent heights of Guadagnino’s own self-assessment.

In interviews, the director tends to adopt the tone of an aristocratic genius stooping to discuss his artistry with some stupid peasant. When one hapless interlocutor asks a perfectly reasonable question about why there are several Nirvana songs in Guadagnino’s new film, Queer, which is based on the 1985 book by William S. Burroughs and set in 1950s Mexico, the director responds with the grandiosity of a Sicilian duke:

I personally have been cultivating my knowledge of Burroughs and passion for him and my attraction for his imagery forever — since I was 16 — which made me meet, in the process, Nirvana. I engraved in my consciousness and unconsciousness a lot of elements that are directly or indirectly related with one another about these two great artists. So when it came to this movie, it was more instinctual, the process of having those choices, more than rational. But the unconscious never lies. These crossover references that you’re directing us towards, they’re very accurate. They’re accurate because the intuition behind it has been nurtured by a deep studying of the texts.

Read a few interviews like that and you expect to be really blown away by the film that results from such unerring “deep study” and “unconscious revelation.” But sadly, Queer is a stubbornly inert film, striving for knockout emotional truths without ever once achieving them.

Daniel Craig exhausts himself playing Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a middle-aged American expatriate in an increasingly dirty, cream-colored Brooks Brothers suit and fedora who’s hanging around Mexico City pursuing his habits — drinking, shooting heroin, writing, and trying to get laid. For some strange reason, Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers) gloss over two of the four habits. We see none of the writing — just the presence of the typewriter in Lee’s sparse hotel room and a close-up of a few much-edited typed pages. And we see very little of the heroin use, though Lee will ultimately get very ill from dysentery, aggravated by his drug use, and his terrible symptoms will dominate a later sequence in the film.

That leaves plenty of time for drinking and trying to get laid, the basic plot of Guadgadino’s Queer: after a series of largely frustrated attempts at connecting sexually or conversationally with young men in bars in Mexico City, Lee falls in love with a boyish, aloof ex-GI of uncertain sexuality named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). In an attempt to overcome Allerton’s resistance to him, Lee brings him along on a trip to South America in search of the legendary drug “yage,” which Lee has heard fosters telepathic communication.

But as you know if you’ve read any Burroughs, that’s really plenty of plot. Because the vivid, terrible clarity of detail, the sensory overload conveyed in the settings, the encounters, the conversations, and the roiling emotional responses to them all, are almost overwhelming. Surely this film will be thick with harsh sounds, distracting sights, even the illusion of odiferous smells.

But Guadagnino goes exactly the other way. His Mexico City is clearly just a film set, patently fake and weirdly empty. Even a street cockfight, with a crowd of men eagerly bidding on the brutal contest, is set in a kind of quiet void. It’s exactly the opposite of the way Burroughs describes Mexico City, and William Lee’s restless movements from hotel to bar to café to street back to hotel might be anyone’s desperate attempts to make something happen.

Your first job as a viewer is to get yourself to believe that Daniel Craig, even in middle age, has a difficult time finding a bedmate of any sexual persuasion. He’s in excellent physical condition, he’s extremely charismatic, and he became a big star in popular James Bond movies for a reason. Surely this is odd casting, and if Craig gets the Best Actor nominations people are expecting, it’ll be partly because he gets you to believe even a little bit in his perpetually thwarted state. Here’s Burroughs describing it:

Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something that he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars. He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar . . . suffering without despair and without consent.

Maybe the late Harry Dean Stanton in a rumpled suit and owlish glasses would be closer to the mark. But at any rate, once you’re more or less on board, you’re asked to identify with Lee’s obsessive pursuit of Allerton, who’s described by Lee’s chubby raffish friend Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) as a “cold fish” — that is, not only cold but also “slippery and hard to catch.”

Lee’s first nervous attempt to charm Allerton is with an ironic courtly bow. In the book, Burroughs describes it as such a grotesque failure it repulses the reserved Allerton, who decides to avoid Lee in the future because he seems to be some kind of mildly insane weirdo. But in the film, we once again trip over the Craig problem — he looks kind of charming botching up his little bow, so Allerton turning away coldly seems to mark him as a judgy drip. Plus, it quickly becomes repetitive. Allerton is almost always turning away coldly. One apparently satisfying sexual encounter doesn’t lead to another, and Lee is forever having Allerton snub him for a red-headed girlfriend he plays chess with in one of their regular hangouts. Eventually, Lee bribes Allerton with an all-expenses-paid trip to South America, in exchange for “being nice” to him twice a week.

Guadagnino is quick to correct critics who call this film a tale of unrequited love. He and his cast all discuss it in terms of “unsynchronized love,” and Guadagnino argues that one scene in particular demonstrates Allerton’s love for Lee. It’s when Lee falls ill on their journey and is lying in one hotel twin bed, shaking violently from chills. He pitifully asks Allerton, who’s turned away, sleeping on the other twin bed, if he can join him. Not moving or opening his eyes, Allerton murmurs a vague agreement and, when Lee embraces him, allows one of his legs to drift back and rest on Lee’s.

Well — okay. It’s still the merest crumb. Watching the film, love seems the least likely explanation for Allerton’s behavior. Though the cagey refusal to admit to being queer, at a time when the consequences for anything but the most ostentatious performance of heterosexuality by men were likely to be severe, made sense. Burroughs made clear that what he liked about Mexico was the way everybody let everybody else alone, no matter what they thought of each other, and he gives his Lee character an exuberant declaration of homosexuality early in his courtship of Allerton that reflects Burroughs’s own rigidly conservative Midwestern roots and attitudes along with his head-spinning rejection of many of them.

It falls flat because of Allerton’s blank lack of response beyond a slightly contemptuous half smile. Guadagnino includes some of the speech in the film:

The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain — I was a homosexual. . . . Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would’ve destroyed myself. And a wise old queen — Bobo, we called her — taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see.

Of course, Guadagnino isn’t obliged to stick to the book, but in interviews he makes such a song and dance of his translation of Burroughs work that it’s hard not to compare them. Eventually, the film departs wildly from its source when Lee and Allerton locate the elusive drug “yage” in the jungles of South America. It’s provided by an absurd cackling old crone (the unrecognizable Lesley Manville, who’s always great regardless), a character you may be sure Burroughs never wrote. There they experience dangerously hallucinatory trip that has them doing a series of interpretive dance moves together, and at that point I gave up entirely.

But though I personally can’t see the appeal, Guadagnino’s films clearly speak to young viewers. They turned out in droves earlier this year for his throuple potboiler, Challengers, a film I despised. Guadagnino even brought several members of the same creative team over for Queer — screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, editor Marco Costa, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Let’s just say I have an Allerton-like relationship to Guadagnino films — cold, aloof, withholding, allowing for an occasional contemptuous smile. Maybe it’s really love, though, and I just can’t admit it!