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Sloppy and uneven, Miracle at St. Anna nonetheless packs the emotional punch Spike Lee is famous for.

Miracle at St. Anna is many things at the same time: an old-fashioned war movie, a meditation on racism in America in the 1940s, and a sober examination of what constitutes a miracle. This is not a “Christian movie,” per se, but it is nonetheless fascinated by demonstrations of faith when all seems lost. Never has the term “grace under fire” felt more appropriate.

Miracle, directed by Spike Lee and adapted by James McBride from his novel, follows four soldiers of the all-black 92nd Buffalo Soldier Division who find themselves stuck deep in Nazi-held territory in Tuscany, Italy. One of the men, PFC Train (Omar Benson Miller) has saved and thus adopted a shell-shocked and possibly traumatized Italian boy (Matteo Sciabordi, in his debut role) who refers to Train as “the Chocolate Giant.” Train is a bit childlike himself, so the match is a good one.

Many diverse elements are converging on Tuscany: an incompetent American officer and his impossible orders, delivered by radio; a regiment of German troops on the hunt for an Italian insurgent (Pierfrancesco Favino), commanded by a reluctant Nazi general; the insurgent himself, and his men and their own struggles; and the town members themselves, torn between loyalty to Italy and the simple reality of ceaseless occupation and shelling. (It’s a strange thing to hear words like “Fascist” and “partisan” thrown around, used in ways quite different from what we’re used to.) Underscoring all of this is the African-American soldiers’ understanding that they are fighting and dying for a country that still has “Whites Only” signs hanging above bathrooms and water fountains.

That all of these elements eventually come together is inevitable; it’s how they do so that makes me regard Miracle at St. Anna as a strange beast. The opening scene is sobering and intense: in 1983 New York, an elderly man spots another elderly man he recognizes, and shoots him dead with a German pistol. Then we’re introduced to a reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the cop assigned to the case (John Turturro, a regular in Mr. Lee’s movies), whose highly stylized banter stands in stark contrast to the opening sequences.

Then we flash back to the war, and we’re treated to one of those hyper-lucid battles with missing limbs and gushing wounds we’ve become accustomed to in the wake of Saving Private Ryan. And then we’re given over to Train and the boy, who engage in humor so broad and gentle it threatens to derail the movie. We are simply not used to seeing that kind of levity in war movies anymore.

It takes a good 45 minutes before Miracle triangulates what kind of movie it wants to be, which is quite a long time indeed, even with a running time of 160 minutes. But once the soldiers and the boy find Tuscany, Miracle finds its soul, and Mr. Lee draws considerable emotional power from his many disparate story threads. The major characters, rendered as recognizable archetypes from war movies of the 50’s and 60’s, take an equally long time finding their resonance—strange, given that brief interludes with minor characters (including the Nazis) show such humanity and mercy. This slow, haphazard build-up is not fatal to Miracle, but it does prevent the movie from being as great as it could be.

And yet I was struck by it. Mr. Lee has branched out in recent years, dabbling with television and genre movies like the bank heist con game Inside Man. His 25th Hour is one of the best American films of the last ten years, and far and away the best movie about 9/11 that is not, explicitly, about 9/11. Miracle at St. Anna continues this outward expansion into new territory. In tone and control, it is Mr. Lee’s sloppiest movie in some time. As a demonstration of emotional power, it is troubling and beautiful.

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