In “Southpaw,” Rachel McAdams, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the rest of the extraordinary cast struggle bravely and energetically with hopelessly bland text and invisible, impersonal direction. Scott Garfield/The Weinstein Company/ Everett

The boxing drama “Southpaw” has the chilling feel of a movie made to fit the requirements of a dictatorship—not a political one but, rather, a bureaucratic one. The creations of the director, Antoine Fuqua, and the screenwriter, Kurt Sutter, seem to have been freeze-dried, cut into card-sized tiles, and laid out sequentially—sustaining only the shallowest definition of character, connected only by the thinnest string of motive, and hermetically isolated from the practicalities among which the action ostensibly takes place.

The story is a pastiche of classic Hollywood boxing dramas. Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal), who grew up in a Hell’s Kitchen orphanage, is the undefeated light-heavyweight champion, but he brings a bitter art to the sweet science: his method is to absorb a vast amount of punishment from his opponent until, seized with rage, he fights back with an irresistibly violent fury. After one bout, his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams)—his lifelong love, raised in the same orphanage—tells him that he’s absorbing too much punishment. She’s the brains of the operation, and when his manager, Jordan Mains (50 Cent), brings in a contract for a three-fight deal, she opposes it.

These early expositional sequences are among the movie’s few attractions; they hint at the behind-the-scenes dramas of the sport, involving media executives, middlemen, family, doctors, and the many other interested parties depending on the agonies in the ring. Unfortunately, they flit by quickly, with no more development than anything else in the movie. Instead, Billy gets into a scuffle with a potential challenger in a hotel ballroom, a gun is fired, Maureen is killed, and Billy is left to raise their young daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence), alone. Possessed by grief and anger, he quickly loses his championship as well as his license to box, destroys his reputation, loses his money, and loses custody of Leila, who becomes a ward of the state.

In order to regain custody, Billy needs to put himself and his career back together. To do so, he turns to the trainer Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), a former fighter who now runs a rumpled street-side gym that’s also a second home to troubled boys from the neighborhood. It’s no spoiler to say that the movie’s other virtue is found—briefly—in these later scenes, when Tick retrains Billy and teaches him skills that the dethroned champion lacks.

For all the story’s classic elements, its core throwback is to the sense of oversupervised overproduction, the sort of rigid controls seen in studio filmmaking from the nineteen-thirties. But back then, that control was exercised by producers who, in many cases, were creators in their own right, people whose business sense arose from their story sense—which arose, in turn, from an authentic popular touch, a fundamental intuition for the great average, for the big emotional targets in their customers’ hearts. Their sense for that sweet spot elevated the work of the industry’s vast run of skilled professionals and frustrated its handful of original artists, who chafed under studio control and thrived in a later day of independent production.

The producers of “Southpaw” haven’t created a film of people for people; they’ve populated the movie with humanoids, mere semblances of people who are endowed with the imitation of life by the thankless exertions of the extraordinary actors who embody them—and whose faces and voices might as well be applied digitally. The modicum of pleasure delivered by “Southpaw” arrives thanks to its cast, who struggle bravely and energetically with the hopelessly bland text and the invisible, impersonal direction. Gyllenhaal slurs and shambles, steams and rampages, swirling with generic energy that, in the absence of cues from the script, he seems to have wrenched from the depths of his training. Whitaker is one of the best actors of his generation, who would be, as they say, fascinating to hear reading a phone book (would that there had been one on the set); McAdams seems to have been directed not to play Maureen but to play Margot Robbie playing Naomi Lapaglia playing Maureen, a stereotype of a stereotype; and 50 Cent is a majestic nonactor whose straightforward talk lends substance to his sadly minor role. Even the earnest young Laurence must contend with such monologues as “I miss you a lot, Mom. More than ever.”

These actors do more than carry the film; they distract from it. In this context-free context, their able and thoughtful efforts seem less like performances than like stunts; the frenetic and spectacular display of actorly work conveys such detached virtuosity that it undercuts, from the start, the very human touch that it signifies, and for which it substitutes.

I recently described “Terminator Genisys” as a “simulacrum of a movie”; the same applies here, and there may be a connection between the two, in the creation of movies for an international market. That’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s a recent one, and it accounts, in part, for the plethora of superhero movies and comic-book-based movies that studios produce—stories that don’t depend on a sense of place, on characters bearing particular local traits, or, for that matter, on characters who bear much resemblance to people anywhere. But because such movies are largely about the technological transformation of humans, the process and the subtext fold back into the subject and become both reflexive and symbolic. Even “Terminator Genisys,” as mediocre as it is, felt like a movie about the very experience of its viewing.

“Southpaw” is different. It’s exactly what certain critics yearn for: a midrange drama for adults. It’s a midrange drama made in a movie economy that has trouble sustaining the format; it’s a delocalized, international-style midrange drama, and, as such, it’s a contradiction in terms. There is almost no process in the film, as if displaying the detailed workings of courts and businesses, of transactions and interrogations, threatened to reveal state secrets; there’s no depth of character in the film, as if the wild vectors of the inner life, the diverse impulses and loose ends of which a personality is made, might undermine the plot’s robotic inevitability. It feels like a post-apocalyptic version of entertainment, a throwback—not to 1934, but to “1984.”