Image by 20th Cent Fox / Everett

Based on the evidence of the movie, I’d bet that Josh Trank, the director and co-writer of “Fantastic Four,” had a clear-minded view of the project’s devolution in his instantly infamous deleted tweet from August 7th, the film’s opening day: “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve recieved [sic] great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”

Even in the released version, which is riddled with cuts and retouched with copious studio-mandated reshoots, “Fantastic Four” is obviously the work of the same Josh Trank who made the giddy low-budget teen sci-fi adventure “Chronicle.” There, Trank told the story of teen-agers who explore an ominous pit and become endowed with telekinetic abilities, which intensify until they can send themselves aloft. He lends the tale both a heartfelt sensitivity and an exhilarating visual energy.

Trank’s “Fantastic Four” is almost the same movie. It traces the scientific genius Reed Richards to his childhood in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where—thanks to a new friendship with his classmate Ben Grimm, the rough-hewn, abused son of a junk-yard owner—he is able to get the electrical supplies he needed to built a prototype of a teleportation device. As high-school seniors, Reed (now played by Miles Teller) and Ben (Jamie Bell) improve the gizmo and get it to work a little too well: they send matter elsewhere in the universe and bring it back, but they also cause a major blackout, a hint that their experiments have grave implications far beyond their expectations. Then, recruited by an unusual New York scientific institute and school, Reed finds some new collaborators—Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan, who also excelled in “Chronicle”), a car racer and automotive genius who lends his mechanical arts to the project; Sue Storm (Kate Mara), a computer whiz; and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), another ambitious scientific leader who is motivated less by the pursuit of knowledge than by reckless vanity, and whose envy of Reed percolates up at inopportune moments.

As in “Chronicle,” Trank displays a keen sensitivity to the authentic sweetness of teen-agers’ ingenuous inspirations—along with the bitterness and anger, the tensions and conflicts that they inspire. There’s a hint of Shane Carruth’s garage-apocalypse science-fiction thriller “Primer” in Trank’s view of the five inventors, though Trank devotes far less effort to the specifics of the wild science. Carruth is a visionary filmmaker, a sort of Terrence Malick with a bent toward science rather than spirituality, and his view of a world on the verge of trans-dimensional disturbance is subtly and quietly apocalyptic. Trank doesn’t come near Carruth’s order of cosmic profundity, but he captures the familial anguish and seething tensions implicit in the pop exuberance of playful creation and apocalyptic calamity alike. (Trank’s direction of Teller, keeping him on the side of distracted nerdiness, lends the actor’s natural swagger a bewildered innocence that adds an extra layer of pathos to the dramas to come.)

That fury comes to the fore when—under bureaucratic pressure from an official, Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), who demands that the project be brought under the aegis of the Army—the five young creators decide to take command of their own experiment, and, with Sue at the controls, the young men teleport themselves into what they think will be another place and turns out to be another set of dimensions.

Up to that point, the movie is methodically constructed like a Rube Goldberg device; it’s vaguely reminiscent of the work of Steven Soderbergh, with an emphasis on process and behind-the-scenes relations. But some of the most overtly dramatic elements of the plot—especially the conflict at the institute, pitting government bureaucrats against the benevolent scientist Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), Johnny and Sue’s father, who godfathers Reed’s project—seem clumsily stuck onto the movie, like public-service announcements interrupting the film’s drifty, droll, subtly ominous flow to declare the presence of drama.

And drama arises not in any significant way from the tacked-on plot points but, rather, from the wild physical results and emotional implications of the scientific mission. When the young men reach a distant alternate world, they inadvertently tap into an alternate form of energy, a sort of explosively biomorphic geology that opens a pit of monstrous green lava and engulfs Victor. In the resulting catastrophic reëntry to Earth, the three men and Sue undergo a molecular transformation that endows them with new traits and powers, new forms and identities that, in comic-book terms, qualify them as superheroes but that, in teen-age terms, render them gross and grotesque.

Reed becomes vastly stretchable at will; Johnny becomes a man of fire; Sue is englobed in a blue force bubble and becomes invisible; and, most pathetically, Ben becomes a rocky horror, the Thing, a mighty humanoid pile of stone whose adamantine strength comes at the price of his new, shapelessly massive, shattered, abrasive monstrous appearance. With the transformation of his heroes into superheroes, Trank shifts the movie toward David Lynch’s turf and tone, an adolescent variant on a theme of “The Elephant Man,” as Ben now turns wildly on his best friend, blaming the goggle-eyed, blank-gazing Reed for his rebarbative new physique and vainly demanding his help in becoming himself again.

Yet as the action—in particular, the transformed quartet’s fight against the enraged Victor—kicks in, so does Trank’s distinctive visual imagination, a quality that inflects even a walk down a hospital corridor with a mnemonic flair but that bursts out with surrealistic glory in such visionary excrescences as Johnny’s majestic flame-ups, his body engulfed in the fire that he exudes from within and that renders his eyes and mouth as blindingly bright blanks.

What’s best about “Fantastic Four” resembles closely what’s best about “Chronicle,” which suggests that what’s worst about “Fantastic Four” results from the changes to Trank’s film that studio executives demanded. Yet not only did the suits spoil “Fantastic Four” but critics have been blaming Trank for their job of cinematic deflavorizing.

Even complaints about the movie’s copious reliance on “origin stories” miss the mark, arising as they do from critics—from people—who would doubtless not part with their own origin stories. It’s a defining mark of modernity not to take actions at face value but to consider them in relation to origins and personal histories, and even to take their connection to individual backstories as emotionally and morally primary. Doing so is a crucial psychological aspect of modern democracy, and backstory is all the more in the mental foreground of Trank’s generation (he’s thirty-one) thanks to the identity-modelling of social media. The front-loaded backstory of “Fantastic Four” isn’t, in itself, a problem of dramatic construction; it’s a fundamental mode of experience, albeit one that’s repeatedly undercut by the distracting antics of the movie’s bureaucratic villain and the needless plot mechanisms that come in his wake.

On the other hand, the story’s bureaucratic interloper, Dr. Allen, does serve one constructive purpose: by wresting control of the grand experiment from its scientific auteurs, he reflects the movie’s own troubled production, serving as a doubtless unintended stand-in for the executives who did the same for Trank’s movie. It isn’t a surprise that a director should endure a large measure of supervisory control on a production that costs two hundred million dollars, as “Fantastic Four” did. But studio supervision, a useful form of quality control on mediocre filmmakers, risks diluting the distinctive qualities of unusually gifted filmmakers such as Trank, regressing to the mean without fulfilling the norm. Thus, because of studio interference, “Fantastic Four,” for all its formidable merits, has become both a critical flop and a commercial disaster.