Jessica Yu’s Protagonist is bravely conceived yet not satisfactory as film. Like her necessarily more speculative 2004 take on an extremely odd, now-hot “outsider” artist-writer, In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger, this documentary makes use of excellent animation (symmetrical from Greek vase-painting, in the section titles) and adds more eye-pleasure in chorus-equivalent commenting wooden rod puppets performing excerpts from Euripidean tragedy. But, as in that earlier prizewinner, the subject is of itself static, or at least treated so.

Avoiding psychoanalytical guesswork, Realms was built from the sixty-year, fifteen-thousand-word novel and countless drawings of a life imaged in the massive mytho-religious epic and innocently perverse illustrations found on the Chicago janitor’s death. But intriguing as Darger’s talents and Yu’s efforts are, stationary art is not the stuff of moving pictures.

Such, too, is the problem with Protagonist, also produced and edited by its artist-writer-teacher director. This project originated in a proposal to do a non-fiction about fifth century BC Euripides, and coalesced into a two-and-a-half-year search to embody that Athenian dramatist’s idea of character and fate leading to tragic passions that disregard limits. The four males selected from among two hundred -- women apparently less “likely to experience the particular breed of obsessive pursuit, and crushing revelation” -- alternate in headshot-relating unhappy outsider childhoods leading to the one-sided behavior which, bottling inner desires or else setting them more apart, could go only so far before smashing against personal and social reality.

Such a tale cries for the dramatization of a Euripides, “neither philosopher nor religious reformer, but a dramatist first and foremost.” On his stage, or on a screen, events inspire awe, trembling, Aristotle’s catharsis, as plot builds from exposition, through complication, passes point-of-no-return crisis, and then releases tensions. Interspersed with quick snapshots or scratchy home footage, Yu’s subjects narrate their trials, falls and redemptions, and thus what flashes on-screen for ninety minutes is in essence a reading rather than a realization, a telling not a showing.

Greek theater is the progenitor of Western drama, and while at its earliest no more than the dithyramb chanted by an all-male chorus of fifty, there was the excitement of live performance, of competition enlarged by religious purpose, costumes and masks, the rhythm of hymned narration and stately movement. Stepping apart as protagonist (first competitor or actor), Thespis of legend (whence, thespian) introduced dramatic movement and conflict in the sense of inter- or re-action. Protagonist would get around its own lack of represented activity through several storyboarded puppet sequences, analogous to the later commenting chorus of Greek crones, but the voiced subtitled classical Greek cannot carry the film and, in any case, after a while becomes distraction instead of intended bulwark.

It first appears that the four speakers have little in common, but the connection emerges, so that, as in Greek drama, suspense arises not in what but how, specifically how far a man can go until inbuilt limitations bring him up short and to awareness. Sympathy for one story or another will be an individual matter, but that of Hans-Joachim Klein addresses today’s political turmoil most directly. In subtitled German, at sixty far the oldest, he tells of a neo-Nazi policeman father, pitiless stepmother, and his Jewish birth mother’s suicide after release from a concentration camp. His path ran from disaffection following the ineffectual demonstrations of 1968, through membership in terrorist cells related to Baader-Meinhof, direct association with infamous Carlos the Jackal, and the fatal kidnapping of eleven OPEC ministers. Severely wounded, Klein killed three, was for a quarter century a fugitive from both terrorists and police in France, finally extradited, sentenced and, now released, a contrite farm worker.

Brutalized by a father off-kilter after his wife’s death, Hispanic Joe Loya retaliated in saving his younger brother. Discovering relief in reacting with violence, he turned to serial bank robbery, as many as three in a single day, as much for the terror in tellers’ faces as for the stolen money. Caught, and once fearing for his sanity in prison solitary, he is currently a journalist and lecturer.

Different, yet linked to Loya’s in their common Christian family background, New Jerseyan Mark Pierpont’s odyssey sprang from his homosexuality. Fighting the “ungodly” tendency, he forced himself into missionary-ministry, preaching to thousands in Asia and at home, even in gay bars, and into marriage, fatherhood, and at last an emotional coming-out admission to his ten-year-old in a Wendy’s. Now grown, that son Joel officiated at Mark and his partner Nick’s Florida commitment ceremony.

Blond and small, Mark Salzman was forever the butt of other kids’ cruelties in Connecticut suburbia until, in John Carradine of TV’s “Kung Fu,” he saw what would become his personal crusade, martial arts perfected under a sadistic black belt master and alliance with one of his own former tormenters. Obscenities jarring with his youthful all-American looks, he stepped back from the brink in time, is today perfecting mind and body in China, “better than the U.S. experience.”

The point, as much from Socrates as Euripides, is that man must shun hubris, or pride, and walk humbly in his allotted place. This was the essence of sophrosyne, more familiar as the Golden Mean: everything and everyone in its place, nothing to excess or extreme. Protagonist tells us this, but the essence of film is to show. 

(Released by IFC Films and Red Envelope; rated "R" for language.)