While watching Edward Norton’s movie version of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn—which hits theaters today—we were reminded of last year’s 10-episode Netflix miniseries of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 horror classic, The Haunting of Hill House. The resemblance isn’t obvious, of course; Motherless Brooklyn isn’t a horror film, after all, but a hard-boiled mystery tale. But, like Haunting, it’s a ghost of the book on which it’s based—one that takes the source text’s basic setup, and a character or two, and simply discards the rest.

The book’s narrator is a 20-something Brooklynite named Lionel Essrog, who has Tourette’s syndrome. His mentor, a low-level criminal named Frank Minna, gave him, and a few of his fellow orphans, jobs running errands and moving stolen goods in the late 1970s and early ’80s. One day in the late ’90s, Frank is murdered while meeting with some shady types, and Lionel is determined to find out why. The mystery involves Frank’s wife; a pair of Italian-American gangsters; a massive thug, whom Lionel calls the “Polish giant”; and a Buddhist meditation hall called the Yorkville Zendo.

The novel focuses a great deal on Lionel’s Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests as an uncontrollable urge to touch and tap things, and most prominently as a kind of word-salad echolalia; for instance, when he hears someone say the phrase “friend of the deceased,” he barks back, “Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!” Lionel, addressing the reader directly, also discusses his disorder at exhaustive length (“Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette’s?”), although readers who don’t have Tourette’s will get little insight into what it’s like for those who do. In real life, for instance, the complex vocal tics that Lionel has are very rare indeed.

The mystery itself will be familiar stuff to Raymond Chandler fans—Lionel even directly references the mystery master by name, and overall, Lethem delivers a fair tribute to private-eye noir. It all wraps up with a massive information dump, though, as if Lethem suddenly remembered that he had to clear up that small matter of a murder.

Norton’s film retains Lionel (whom he plays himself), as well as a few other characters, and the opening, up to Frank’s murder, is mostly faithful to the book. Not much else is, though. First off, the film takes place in 1957, and the reasons for Frank’s murder are entirely different. There are no gangsters and no Buddhist zendo in this story; instead, the plot involves brand-new players, including the powerful, villainous head of the Borough Authority, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), an obvious stand-in for notorious real-life power broker Robert Moses; activist Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones), a thinly veiled version of Jane Jacobs; and her ally, attorney Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). On the periphery are an initially mysterious and knowledgeable man named Paul (Willem Dafoe) and a jazz trumpeter (Michael Kenneth Williams) called “Trumpet Man” in the credits but clearly modeled after Miles Davis.

The cast members all give solid performances, even when the vaguely Chinatown-ish material they have to work with isn’t really up to par; at one point, for instance, Randolph witnesses a protest against his destructive and racist urban-planning policies and says, “I’ve never seen such horseshit in my life.” (If he had a mustache, he’d twirl it.) At another point, “Trumpet Man”—oh, let’s just call him Miles—and Lionel have a discussion that weirdly equates Lionel’s disorder with Miles’ musical talent. A lot of the dialogue is clunky and expository, as well, which is unsurprising, given that it’s Norton’s first credited screenplay. It does give him plenty of Tourettic stage-business as an actor, but otherwise, it practically ignores Lethem’s novel entirely.

Earlier this week, Lethem indicated to The Hollywood Reporter that he’s fine with Norton’s wholesale alteration of his work: “It’s always felt, from that moment, it was his artwork,” he said. “He had something he wanted to make, and I was like ‘Great, take my character and run with it.’” In the end, however, Norton doesn’t run anywhere that’s particularly interesting.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.