“I Am Gitmo” is an earnest attempt at bringing the Guantanamo Bay inmates’ story — foreign nationals accused of terrorism, held and tortured for years, with no trials or hope of release — back to the headlines.

It’s a downbeat, low-energy, modest budget affair that covers some of the same ground as “The Mauritanian,” “Camp X-Ray” and many documentaries on this “extra legal” prisoner of war purgatory.

Basically, the best reason to make it is that people are still being held there. And it’s always a challenge shooting a movie without the money to build replicas of Afghan neighborhoods, a prison camp on a military base and the like, and seeing how convincing you can make it all.

But you’ve got to have more than good intentions and a grasp of how to do things on the cheap — mothballed “museum” military aircraft as backdrops, an intentionally “fake” tank, a coil of barbed wire to mimic an exercise yard — to justify making a movie that’s already been made and a story that others have already told.

Flat performances of a dull and cliche-ridden script aren’t enough to make us forget that Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart and others got there first, with more money and a more compelling version of this story to tell.

Philippe Diaz’s high-minded movie tells us the story of one inmate, Gamel (Sammy Sheik), an Egyptian veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviets who stayed in Aghanistan afterwards, married and had children and became a school teacher.

But weeks after the U.S. invasion after 9-11, he is betrayed by a neighbor cashing-in on the American bounty on “terror suspects,” handcuffed and hooded and spirited off to one “enhanced interrogation” after another.

“Right arm of Osama bin Laden,” he is labeled by his CIA torturers. “You have no rights. Nobody cares about you.”

Eventually, prisoner 121 is masked and flown to Guantanomo Bay.

That’s where he becomes the responsibility of John Anderson (Eric Pierpoint), an Army interrogator summoned back to active duty to (reluctantly) break all the “rules” and ignore all his common sense under this new regime, “approved by the president,” defending by the vice president in a TV interview he watches at one point.

We hear Gamel read from a wrong letter to his wife that may never make it to her, recounting his dismay, terror and outrage at his treatment. We also hear the religious Anderson write a diary for his daughter, who keeps urging him to watch videos of Nelson Mandela to see the error in his ways.

The film introduces no holds-barred torturers, smirking and abusive enlisted personnel, always ready with a Polaroid, a lawyer and one of Gamel’s fellow inmates as one and all recover familiar ground and try to animate hoary lines like “Last chance! Where is Osama bin Laden?”

This “Taxi to the Dark Side” has the phrase “a compelling story” hardwired into it. But Diaz (“Now & Later,” and the doc “The End of Poverty” were his) and his experienced but charisma-starved cast of unknowns fail to bring it to life or make us care.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sammy Sheik, Eric Pierpoint, Paul Kampf, Jason Reid and
Iyad Hajjaj

Credits: Scripted and directed by Philippe Diaz. A Bayview Ent. release.

Running time: 1:55