“Origin” is an important film, a movie that attempts to tie — in intellectual terms — the oppression and enslavement of Africans in the Americas with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the immobility of India’s “untouchable” “caste” system.

It’s a “writer’s journey” tale about a Pulitzer-prize-winning American journalist and non-fiction writer Isabel Wilkerson’s efforts to understand why “racism” is “the primary language to understand everything” about American racial inequality, and her realization that the term “racism” is “inadequate” in that role.

“Caste” was the key, she came to believe, and she turned that thesis and exploration into a best seller — “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” — which came out just as the 2020 presidential election was entering its crucial last weeks.

There’s no dishonor in writer-director Ava Duvernay’s reach exceeding her grasp with this big, broad and meaningful subject. Her movie meanders when it’s meant to sprawl and drifts between melodramatic — Wilkerson’s personal tragedies informing the book as she began it — and pedantic even when it’s at its most moving.

Duvernay, who has held most every position and job one can collect a check for on film and TV sets, and who directed “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time,” remains a better producer than director, even if what this picture sorely lacks is a producer who tells the director what to trim, tighten, streamline and emphasize.

But she’s made her “Malcolm X,” a quest story about the search for that curse that ties so much human misery together, the need to segregate, isolate, stigmatize and demonize in order to create a hierarchy to one group’s advantage and many others’ disadvantage.

We meet Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor of “King Richard” and “The Color Purple,” as she makes the social scene in Washington with her doting husband Brett (Jon Bernthal), celebrating her latest book on America’s “Great Migration” of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to opportunity and new challenges in the North and West.

But she’s buttonholed by a newspaper editor (Blair Underwood) who insists she needs to write something about the Trayvon Martin case, which has just happened. Even as she recognizes the legacy of lynching, the violence of police towards African Americans and “Nazi symbolism all over the place” in the U.S., Wilkerson resists this story.

“I don’t do assignments any more,” she says. She doesn’t want to merely “report” a story, but the “be inside the story.” That takes a book.

She mulls over the “connective tissue” she starts to see in racism, anti-Semitism and the “caste” system that sentenced one group, the “Dalit” “untouchables” of India, to permanent degradation and servitude.

As Wilkerson does, tragedy strikes her life and makes her ponder the weight of racism and undersclass status on her accomplished mother (Emily Yancy), an educated Black woman “married to a Tuskegee Airman” who can’t stop herself from fretting that young Trayvon Martin didn’t answer “that man right,” blaming an innocent young Black victim for his own death.

Wilkerson also marvels at the white husband who left his “caste” behind to marry her.

With her editor’s (Vera Farmiga) backing, Wilkerson travels to Germany and India, following in the footsteps of Black researchers Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker, Jasmine Cephas Jones), anthropologists doing research in Germany just as the Nazis took over.

The Nazis, Wilkerson and others note, studied American Jim Crow laws in order to make The Holocaust possible. Thus, the Davis’s book “Deep South” becomes one of the cornerstones of Wilkerson’s own work.

She travels to India to learn from academics following in the footsteps of B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit caste Indian who studied in Bombay, London and New York, an economist who wrote and agitated about the injustice of India’s caste system and who had a hand in writing India’s constitution.

Wilkerson takes lessons from her own family (Niecy Nash plays her closest cousin) about racial faultlines and “race-mixing” in marriages, and from a MAGA-capped plumber (Nick Offerman) whom she tries to establish a human connection with.

It’s no surprise that Duvernay resorts to having Ellis-Taylor voice-over long passages as we see flashbacks to an infamous incident in Nazi Germany, to a Southern lynching, to racist incidents leading into the Civil Rights Movement and to the Davis’s harrowing efforts researching America’s racist caste system during the Depression for their landmark 1941 book, “Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class.”

There’s a lot to wrestle with here, pushback from German researchers (Connie Nielsen) about Wilkerson’s connecting the Holocaust to slavery and Indian caste oppression, visits to Holocaust museums and memorials all over and The Legacy Museum in Alabama.

Duvernary, never a graceful director or writer, never quite wrestles all this into shape. The film lurches along, grasping at threads and ideas more fully grappled with in Wilkerson’s book, struggling to “personalize” a book that reaches far and draws on many sources, ideas and arguments in stating its thesis.

There are moving moments, wrenching and even revolting ones. But they’re separated by a narrative so pedantic it demands footnotes, or a lot more of them than I’ve added to this review.

Ellis-Taylor is reduced to playing an under-developed tour guide through this thought exercise, “personal struggles” notwithstanding.

One always appreciates an effort this ambitious, and like “Selma,” the subject matter alone makes “Origin” worth your while. But the evidence on the screen, over and over again, suggests that Duvernay’s first, best destiny is producing — making sure movies like this happen, pulling together resources and hiring talent, getting the story she wants told out there.

“Origin” is noble, high-minded, moving and eye-opening. But as difficult as it was sure to be, shaping these themes, threads and characters into a movie, the film should have been sharper, tighter, poignant but more to the point.

Rating:  PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, violence, some disturbing images, language and smoking.

Cast: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash, Isha Blaaker, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Connie Nielsen, Finn Wittrock, Victoria Pedretti, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Vera Farmiga and Blair Underwood

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ava Duvernay, based on “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:16