He Was Out of the Game. Then a War Zone Called.

Jon Hamm looks so much like a movie star that it’s always startling that he isn’t one. The major studios don’t produce many leading roles for actors like Hamm, adults who would look even more unhappy in a Batman get-up than Ben Affleck does. But Hamm was of course perfect for “Mad Men,” where I always saw him as a somewhat sinister variation on old-Hollywood stars like John Gavin, one of those tall, dark and handsome squares the 1960s made obsolete. Hamm looked so ridiculously, perfectly cast as Don Draper that it took me a while to see that he was actually working.

Hamm is the main reason to see “Beirut,” in which he plays Mason Skiles, a former American diplomat who, a decade after retiring, is swept up again in a complex Middle Eastern intrigue. A grown-up superhero type — drawn closer to a world-weary John le Carré operative than a savior hatched by Tom Clancy — Mason has serious, somewhat opaque skills, a heavy political history and a lot of mileage on his soul. He’s a mystery of a kind, a puzzle to work out in tandem with the larger story, a rubric of deception involving warring interests and populated by gangs of sweaty, heavily armed men.

Some of the sweatiest, most dangerous are the Americans camped out in the fiery wreckage of Beirut whom Mason warily joins. Back in 1972, the year that Richard Nixon was re-elected president and the Watergate story broke, Mason had been living the good life in Beirut, apparently at ease in his cosmopolitan bubble. Catastrophic violence upended his life, sending him back to the States, where, drowning in alcohol, he sleepwalks through work as a union negotiator. Now, seven years into the Lebanese civil war, Mason is summoned back to Beirut to help broker the release of a kidnapped CIA agent.

The screenwriter Tony Gilroy, best known for the “Bourne” franchise (he also wrote and directed “Michael Clayton”), has a knack for twisty thrillers that personalize the political. “Beirut” is a slower moving and less propulsive distant cousin to that series; Mason isn’t a spy, for starters, and he talks rather than fights or motorcycles his way out of trouble. His most obvious superhuman talent, at least until the story gets its game on, seems to be an ability to consume prodigious amounts of booze without obvious consequences. But like Bourne, Mason is burdened by history — his own and that of the United States — which means that his mission is at once inwardly and outwardly directed.

After some narrative time-and-space hopscotching, Mason lands in Beirut and the story settles into focus. He takes a grim, unscenic tour of the city’s devastation (with Morocco standing in for war-ravaged Lebanon), and meets some demonstrably frosty friendlies from the CIA and the State Department. Amid the introductions and sneers — the kidnapped CIA agent has been taken by a very active, murderous terrorist group — some of the Americans give Mason the stink eye and a jittery CIA operative (Rosamund Pike) settles in for perilous baby-sitting duties. (The fine supporting cast also includes Larry Pine, Shea Whigham and an appropriately unsettling Jonny Coyne.)

The director Brad Anderson adeptly handles the story’s many parts, the dealing and dealers, the jittery car trips and late-night machinations. Some of this is very familiar, namely the white American abroad who, while navigating the churn of dangerously competing interests (largely American, Israeli and Palestinian), is unpacking a lot of personal baggage in a world that never comes into satisfying, humanizing focus. For the most part, the non-Israeli Middle Eastern characters (one exception is given a pulse by Idir Chender) are relegated to negligible roles. They’re the anonymous passers-by, partygoers and guards overseeing the city’s makeshift checkpoints with machine guns.

The absence of Arab voices beyond those of the terrorists further flattens a movie that never fully takes satisfying shape. Part of the problem is that the story keeps slinking away from politics, opting to poke around in American geopolitical self-interest while always returning to its protagonist, who’s as much a casualty of that self-interest as a perpetrator. Hamm certainly makes it easy to care for Mason and all that he signifies, and it’s a pleasure to watch him just silently nurse another drink, a lifetime of regret weighing on him. Yet as Mason sits alone, the shadows closing around him, you also catch sight of a character whose past — including a cozy association with Henry Kissinger — suggests a tougher, harder and more interesting movie than the one you are watching.

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