Jake Gyllenhaal did not land a Golden Globe nomination for his lead performance in “Stronger,” in which he played Jeff Bauman, the real-life young man who lost the lower half of his legs in the Boston Marathon bombing. But the actor is still in contention for an Oscar nomination. Rather than tracing the familiar arc of the hero’s journey, the film plumbs Mr. Bauman’s ambivalence about being noisily celebrated as a patriot after the atrocity.

Mr. Gyllenhaal, 37, said that he and Mr. Bauman, who turned 31 this month, grew extremely close on the movie. “He has a light,” Mr. Gyllenhaal said during a chat with me late last year at his production offices in SoHo, which featured a hefty supply of addictive chocolate chip cookies and the amiable presence of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s German shepherd, Atticus. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

“Patriots Day” was another film about the Boston bombing, and made around the same time as “Stronger.” But it was more about getting the bad guys, and yours is questioning the idea that just surviving this automatically makes you a hero. Did you worry that the films had too much overlap?

All of us focus on the spectacle of a horrific event, and then also the people who’ve committed a crime. And it’s about getting justice served. And something about Jeff, his story wasn’t about the conventional idea of the triumph of the human spirit; it was about the struggle with that idea, which I was fascinated by. We all live in a world where resolution is what we desire. This didn’t really give you that. All of his problems still remain. I believe in changing — I have deep hope. But I don’t think we can dismiss our complications for that.