The Long Walk was originally published in paperback in 1979. It was credited to Richard Bachman, but it was actually the handiwork of Stephen King, a literary ruse he orchestrated to put out more books after his publisher grew concerned that his prolific nature was already starting to oversaturate the market. It was also not exactly a new work. King wrote it in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when he was still in college, and it bears the thematic imprint of its era. In the time that King wrote it, the story of young men drafted from a lottery into a practically no-win endurance test that forges brotherhood among them as they are picked off one by one by bullets fired from military weapons is a clear analogue for the Vietnam War. A few decades later, the metaphor has opened up. In the new film version of the story, this death march can stand in for any number of modern woes, from the United States careening towards authoritarianism to the adversarial cruelty of late-stage capitalism.

Director Francis Lawrence knows his way around dystopian murder contests waged by young people. He’s directed four installments in the Hunger Games film series and is currently working on a fifth. He presides over the screen version of The Long Walk like it’s the antidote to the garish vastness of the film franchise that he toils on often enough to consider it his day job. In his rendering, The Long Walk is grim and lean, leaning into its disturbing premise with a unflinching gaze.

The title spectacle brings together fifty young men who are charged to walk down a desolate rural highway with no break or rest, until only one is left to be declared the victor and claim whatever prize he chooses. They must always keep their pace above three miles per hour and stay on the road. Those who violate the rules too many times are shot dead by refereeing soldiers right there on the pavement, the others expected to move past them and continue their trudge. Lawrence depicts many of these murderous moments of violence with a graphic frankness that is hard to watch. I think that’s precisely the point, to confront the viewer with the actual effects of a bullet fired into a human being rather than the flailing stuntman collapses that pass for gunplay consequences in most action movies. It’s a defensible choice, but Lawrence too often misses the mark and winds up with moments that come across as gratuitous rather than artistically confrontational.

The film mostly works because it is effective as a multi-headed character study. The screenplay is credited to JT Mollner, the writer and director of the fine, twisty thriller Strange Darling, and he takes care to develop the characters beyond their very King-ian types, such as bully (Charlie Plummer), angry jock (Garrett Wareing), and wisecracker (Tut Nyuot). Taking full advantage of the road-movie conventions available to him given the contours of the premise, Mollner teases out the complexities of these characters gradually, revealing surprising layers even as he stays true to their foundational personalities. To the film’s great benefit, the two actors who essentially serve as co-leads — Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson — are both exceptional. Hoffman especially brings a naturalness to his role, lending the film the believability it needs to fully work.

Well, maybe The Long Walk doesn’t fully work, but it works well enough. For a story that’s many decades old, it’s miserably of the moment. No matter how many steps are taken, progress is illusory and there’s no real win to claim at the end. The cynicism feels as solid and real as asphalt.