Written by David Hare, the movie opens around 1961, after Rudy has defected to the West. It’s a promising start because of Fiennes’s presence as Alexander Pushkin, Rudy’s teacher and mentor in Leningrad. Pushkin, his face gray and hairline in severe retreat, looks defeated, almost deflated, as if every atom in his body has surrendered. He and a government type are discussing Rudy (the kid’s gotta dance!), a scene that activates the story by turning back the clock. From that point on, the timeline jumps around, perhaps in imitation of its high-flying subject, landing in different moments in Rudy’s life.

A lot of what follows is drowsily watchable. Soon after Pushkin’s entrance, Rudy makes several of his own: on a Soviet train, where he’s born in 1938; as an adult on a plane; as a boy in a colorless childhood filled with snow and Ashcan browns; and as a teenage student. Though Fiennes keeps changing the aspect ratio, the movie settles down once Rudy lands in Paris smiling under a beret. At the height of the Cold War, the Kirov Ballet has gone west to perform at the Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier). Rudy embraces Paris, visits the sights, dazzles audiences and hangs out with a dreary crowd. In time, he defects. (The cast includes the exasperatingly limp Adèle Exarchopoulos as an heiress.)

Nureyev certainly seems an ideal candidate for big-screen memorializing: He was sternly beautiful, wildly talented, feverishly acclaimed. But if you didn’t know why he was considered a transcendent dancer or a transformational figure, you still won’t know after the final credits roll. Rudy’s dances are well-shot — Fiennes emphasizes the entire body in motion so the viewer can trace its line — but they’re pretty and bloodless instead of thrilling, which doesn’t encourage offscreen oohing and ahhing. Like most movies about great art, “The White Crow” only points at the sublime without ever expressing it.

One flaw that Fiennes never transcends is Ivenko, a dancer with a Russian company who slides off the screen when not onstage. The busy, mosaic structure doesn’t help, while the emphasis on Nureyev’s origin story seems a mistake, particularly because his name no longer means what it once did. In a 1962 review, the year after Nureyev defected, the British critic Richard Buckle announced the arrival of the “pop dancer,” writing, “What the telly did for art, what Billy Graham did for religion, Nureyev has done for ballet.” Rudy the pop dancer is missing, as is the global star who dabbled as a matinee idol (“Valentino”), was a casualty of the AIDS crisis and still inspires veneration, however artfully muddled.