There are two movies at war in The Lookout. The first is a methodical look at the life of a young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) managing a handful of mental disabilities after a serious car crash. The second is about that same sweet-natured guy taken advantage of by a group of hoodlums who know he works at a bank. They want access to the vault, and they first seduce and then coerce him into playing lookout while they do the job. The first story dominates the first half, the second the last half. Both are equally well-told, but fans of one may be distracted or bored by the other.

Chris Pratt was a kid who had everything ahead of him. Handsome, wealthy, talented, and basically a decent guy. One night’s unwise driving destroys his relationship with his girlfriend and kills two of his friends. And Chris now has problems with “sequencing”; he forgets what order everything happens in, which manifests less like Memento and more like forgetting how to count money. He locks his keys in his car so often he has a spare in his shoe. He attends “life skills” classes, visits with his caseworker Janet (Carla Gugino, in a role so minuscule I have a feeling the rest of it’s on a cutting room floor somewhere), cooks dinner for his blind roommate Lewis (Jeff Daniels), and works overnight cleaning up a farming bank in rural Kansas. It’s a perfectly okay life, but less than fulfilling for a guy in his early 20’s who had so much more waiting for him.

So Chris can’t help but perk up when Gary (Matthew Goode) steps into his life, and Luvlee (Isla Fisher) right after him. Gary’s got an air of danger about him, but he’s older and seems to enjoy Chris’s company. Luvlee has the kind of fashion sense and morals that come with a name like “Luvlee,” and also seems into Chris, despite his problems. For Chris, it’s like his stale and orderly life has been injected with a healthy amount of chaos and unpredictability. He’s eager to keep his new friends, so he’s eager to play along with whatever they’re doing. He’s the perfect inside man.

Which is where the robbery comes in. To the credit of writer-director Scott Frank (The Interpretor, Minority Report), the action squarely focuses on the characters, never resorting to outlandish robbery plots or stylized violence. It’s fitting that it does: The Lookout is about small-time people robbing a small-time bank. It’s not Heat. The transition from one type of film to another is mostly smooth and seamless, and all that work constructing Chris’s life pays off in building empathy for him and the supporting cast, invaluable for giving a hoot about what happens to them next.

But I’m still conflicted about that transition. When I attend a screening, I try to know as little as possible about the movie I’m seeing; hype, I’ve learned over the course of my life, is typically the enemy. I knew very vague details that The Lookout is “about” a bank robbery, but the first 45 minutes or so lulled me into this unusually empathetic and interesting study of Chris and the tension wrought from him knowing how limited his life has become. When Gary and Luvlee enter his life, the story takes a twist. When we discover exactly what kind of people Gary and Luvlee are, it takes another… and by then the movie hardly resembles the one we walked in to.

I should admire how natural the director and cast make it all look. And I do, to a degree. But I wonder which idea came to Frank first: the story of Chris, or the story of the robbery. How did he marry the two ideas? Which one led into the other? Is the result greater than the sum of its parts? I admire the craftwork, I admire the performances, and I admire the script. But the movie suffers for its mid-stream change in identity. Of course, your mileage may vary.