In Mr. Nolan’s hands, however, wily Odysseus becomes a different, if still recognizable, type: the halfway hero. He’s a man who in some way fails to be a father, a man who dirties himself in the name of a higher cause but then discovers that the cause wasn’t worth it, a man with the power to change the world but who, in the end, either fails to do so or makes the world worse.

Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Mr. Nolan’s previous film, this halfway hero seems protected from self-knowledge, either through culpable naïveté or blinding arrogance. Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, for instance, is shocked that once he gets the Greeks into Troy, his comrades loot it and kill the inhabitants. He plucks his bow while hunting out of a sense of sportsmanship and, when his ships set sail to go home, he decides not to take provisions from Troy because, he says, they’ve taken enough from the city already.

This is, as mentioned, an Odysseus for modern people, and modern people struggle with the idea of true heroes. A figure who identifies what needs to be done and then does it without tremendous inner conflict? What’s the point of that? Such a person will make most modern audiences only feel like failures. Perhaps contemporary viewers don’t trust the idea of a sharp, decisive leader, or perhaps the notion of doing something without feeling bad about it seems inherently villainous to them. In contemporary politics, Americans tend to alternate between people who tell us nothing can be done and people who swear everything can be done, both of which disappoint in their own ways. So Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, who struggles after doing something that turns out to be the wrong thing, feels like a particularly compelling figure.

In stories, we seem to be drawn to these halfway heroes: people who sort of know what to do but have a lot of trouble doing it and whose eventual moment of personal resolution somehow fixes everything in the end. In its least artful forms, this turns art into an ersatz therapy session in which you forgive yourself for your failures — and then you save the world.

Mr. Nolan is more artful than that. His heroes are often exceptional men who cause problems, then agonize over how to make amends. The fact that they are men is no accident. Their failures at both masculinity and intimacy are essential to understanding them. They aren’t good men, in the sense of upstanding members of the community who work toward building something better. And they aren’t bad men, which is to say violent parasites. Instead, they’re halfway heroes, charismatic but hollow people who deem love as something best shown by their absence because their presence proves to be too dangerous.