When in a movie a harried, cynical, pencil-pushing government bureaucrat is saddled with an assignment he doesn’t want, during a crisis in his employment, you know how it’s going to go. Just as in a Hallmark movie where the overextended urban single woman gets lured out to a distant aunt’s rural bed-and-breakfast, there are going to be some life changes.

In the fact-based film “The Last Full Measure,” Sebastian Stan plays Scott Huffman, a Department of Defense legal cog solicited by a Vietnam veteran (William Hurt) to pursue a Medal of Honor for a fallen colleague, an Air Force pararescue medic named William H. Pitsenbarger. Initially inclined to shrug the case off, Huffman speaks to Pitsenbarger’s parents, played by Christopher Plummer and Diane Ladd, and to the soldiers he saved, a traumatized group that includes one who has been sitting on a secret for over 30 years. (The film’s action is mostly set in 1999, with flashbacks to Vietnam in 1966.) Huffman becomes a believer, then a crusader.