When director Duncan Jones hit the road a couple of years ago with his first feature, the astronaut-on-the-verge indie “Moon,’’ he fielded more than a few questions about his famous dad, David Bowie. Still, nothing like a cerebral, dramatically sharp, visually overachieving sci-fi movie to help steer interview conversation in a different direction. Now Jones is back, with “Source Code,’’ a $30 million-plus, time-twisting mind-bender starring Jake Gyllenhaal that opens Friday. If the movie’s ambitions, Hitchcockian suspense, and heroic pathos resonate with audiences as early screenings indicate they might, don’t be surprised if the next Duncan Jones story you read does not mention Bowie at all.

In “Source Code,’’ Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago commuter train with no memory of how he got there; no understanding, certainly, of why he looks in a mirror and sees another man’s reflection; and no warning when the train suddenly explodes. Cut to a high-tech isolation pod, where, in bits and pieces, Colter gets the facts: He’s been drafted for an urgent mission to identify a terrorist who bombed the train hours earlier, and who’s imminently going to strike again. A top-secret program, dubbed the Source Code, enables Colter to cross over into the body of doomed passenger Sean Fentress — and a parallel reality — for eight minutes leading up to the blast. And our hero’s government handlers will keep sending him back to do it all again until he completes his mission, or real time runs out.

It’s the kind of fractured, repeating narrative that fans of “Memento’’ and other puzzle-box movies and shows eat right up, then digest ad infinitum. (See sidebar on Page N10 for some of our favorite examples.) Count Jones among those fans. During a stop in Boston last week, the director looks around the dark-toned, windowless interview space of a certain jailhouse-turned-hotel, and brightly jokes, “They’ve got me shackled to the table.’’ But given how enthusiastically he talks film, chatting about the way the “Source Code’’ script had him flashing back to, say, “12 Monkeys,’’ you know you could trust him with the key. “Rather than try to hide the influences, I tried to make them obvious,’’ says Jones, 39. “I mean, Scott Bakula is the voice [in a dramatic phone-call exchange] because I read that mirror scene and thought, ah, ‘Quantum Leap’! ’’