Aside from the mixed humor and sadness of The Angel Levine, films like The Fixer, The Natural and The Assistant have been neither faithful nor fair to the late Jewish-and-Brooklyn writer Bernard Malamud. Now comes Danny Green’s solo début, The Tenants, a highly tinkered-with effort “based on” the same-name book.

Deluded scriptwriters think to make classics better, so Dickens’ Estella becomes Paltrow as New York nudie, bewigged Yul Brynner nice-guys Faulkner’s odious Jason Compson. But, like David Diamond’s in the present case, their “improvements” achieve nothing but distorted dumbing down. Building from story-master Chekhov’s “writer’s ego is a sickness of the soul,” Malamud’s minor 1971 tale doubled the authorial egos and let them clash, and adds the author’s patented concerns with Jewish and African-American maleness and tradition. But, in senseless alterations and additions, plus a misguided and in places inaccurate emphasis on time and place, this movie is a disservice to author as well as to audience.

In the pre-yuppified, 1972 Borough of Churches, Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott) slaves away at his breakthrough, third novel. In notes and in person, landlord Irving Levenspiel (Seymour Cassel) begs, “please have mercy,” and offers several times the going fee if he will vacate his nicely done-up seventy-two-dollars-a-month #605 “flat,” so that the then-empty building can be sold at profit. Exasperated by interruptions, Harry calmly but firmly refuses until the novel is finished on his Olympic typewriter and consequent artistic fame assured.

This confident dedication has not counted on a second, more troublesome distraction, the at-first ghostly clacking of another machine, the even bigger Royal of squatter Willie Spearmint (Snoop Dogg), ex-dealer and –hustler who proclaims that his in-progress Missing Life will portray true black experience plus make him lots of money. Gentle and isolated Jewish Harry’s overtures of professional and friendly company are brutally spurned by the novice. Immediately, he changes his tune but not his tone, acerbically demanding advice and storage space. Soon he returns to party, with his “white Jewish chick” and another couple.

Smoking his first joint, Harry is attracted to Willie’s surly Irene (Rose Byrne) but settles for the come-on of Mary Kettlesmith (Niki J. Crawford), who shortly becomes his first black bedmate -- “don’t make too much of it” -- and, character-changing herself, the root of an ominous obscene “sounding” (“ranking,” to whites) goaded on by her unhappy steady (Alndis Hodge, as Sam).

His personal reality shifting and shifty, the arrogant, insulting and thin-skinned Willie blusters and wheedles into Harry’s fragile peace of mind. The black writer is proprietary, obscene, sexually hungry and offhanded about Irene, though some sort of love is said to exist. An aspiring actress, she would marry him, seems financially secure, performs on the stage in Ibsen, visits museums and galleries, and is easily physically and romantically engaged by the smitten cultured white, with whom she wants to flee when his masterwork is finished in a couple months. But Willie must first be told, or will find out, and she is afraid.

This not particularly imaginative logjam lumbers towards resolution; and arrives there, in a dénouement that will involve the Hawthorne-Malamud artist’s conundrum of love vs. art and the bathos of a stalking down long, and overused, graffitied hallways out of The Shining and gussied up with silly horror music.

The usually dependable Cassel is a caricature this time around, even his accent ringing false. But limited screen time spares him the greater failings of miscast Australian Byrne, gangly angry Snoop Dogg, and expressionless McDermott, whose ‘70s white soulman gazes sheepishly over glasses, a beard and corduroy sports jacket and emotes hurt by howling. In fairness, greater talent than theirs could have done little with the tin-ear dialogue. Good thirty-year-old vernacular sounds naïve and stilted today, but, sprinkled with an anachronism or so, this speech is merely bad. Think: poorly managed stereotype.

(Released by Millennium Films and rated "R" for pervasive language, some violence, sexual content and drug use.)