There have been worthy big screen interpretations of the Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs over the years.

Kieffer Sutherland played him in “Beat.” Peter Weller took on Burroughs’ alter ego (and pen name) “Bill Lee” in David Cronenberg’s celebrated adaptation of “Naked Lunch,” and Viggo Mortensen’s crusty, mercurial “Old Bull Lee” interpretation was a highlight of the film based on Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Being as “post modern” as they come — gender fluid, an addict prone to violence and notorious in his own right — of course Burroughs played offbeat old men characters (versions of his curmudgeonly self) in a film or two, most famously in “Drugstore Cowboy.”

But Daniel Craig’s take on the guy, playing the lead in the Luca Guadagnino’s film of Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel “Queer,” feels “definitive.” His Bill Lee is lonely and lovelorn, struggling to understand his sexuality. He’s a junky, shooting up when he isn’t drinking Mexico City dry.

And he’s dangerous. “Queer” or not, introverted and writerly and lovesick (in this story) he may be. But that snub nose revolver on his hip suggests he’s ready to meet violence with violence. “Paranoid?” Maybe. The “accidental” shooting of his wife and “shooting as art” on paintings would come later.

Craig’s version of Burroughs’ Bill Lee veers between brooding loner and tries-too-hard chatterbox, a bisexual Hemingway, holding forth at assorted bars — “queer” and otherwise — in the Mexico City of about 1950.

Bill Lee ponders his sexual “monster” status as a homosexual in a world that didn’t tolerate people like him in the least. And he knocks back shots and tests out his gaydar on new talent rolling into town. Lots of American men took their G.I. Bill money, inheritances, savings and the like and went south to Mexico and beyond, where homosexuality wasn’t any more illegal than hard drugs — cocaine and heroin.

Bill cruises the bars and parties, chats up amusing, cruising friends like Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman, padded, bearded and hilarious), who is forever letting hook-ups steal from him — cameras, his typewriter — and rivals/frenemies like the swanning Virginian John Dumé (Drew Droege of TV’s “The Great North”).

And then Lee finally meets “the one.” This young Navy vet is tall, lean, bespectacled and elusive. Bill’s never been comfortable asking straight out “Are you queer?” His friends know this. Bill’s aware of a telltale “look” to keep in mind, but he’s as wrong as often as he’s right. He’s uncertain enough to never quite know when he’s supposed to pay for the sex he just had in a local hotel room, or if it was a mutually consensual pickup, no strings or pesos attached.

He’s never learned to take rejection well, either.

How’s Bill Lee supposed to figure out the almost-teasing Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey)? He watches the guy play chess with a lady friend, almost nightly, and puts himself in Eugene’s field of view until they start to hang out, and the hanging-out leads to something more. Eventually.

Lee is over the moon, a weepy drunk and clingy suitor. But he’s pursuing this first great love without compromise. Bill Lee still likes his drink, likes his coke and loves his needle. It takes a bribe — an offer to take Eugene, all expenses paid, “to South America” (Panama and beyond) — for our hero to live his dream, with a traveling partner in tow.

He’s read a “magazine article” about this new herbal discovery, “iliana,” and its supposed telepathic properties. He leads his relatively sober and somewhat indifferent “love” on a mad jungle quest to visit the one scientist (Lesley Manville) “researching” this, outside of the KGB.

“Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ narrative lets us believe that Bill Lee believes this trip, quest and drug could be transcendent in ways that make this love affair with a much younger man permanent.

And with this source material, that screenwriter and the director of “Call Me By Your Name” and the “Suspiria” remake behind the camera, we know to expect hallucinogenic dreams and explicit non-binary sex.

The period piece nature of “Queer” makes this Guadagnino’s most accessible film, with even the anachronistic modern pop and grunge rock (“All Apologies”) of the soundtrack seeming to suit a story from an age when homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Manville is earthy, bluff and earthly wise as that pistol-packing “researcher” in the jungle. Schwartzman makes every pick-up-gone-wrong tale a hoot. Starkey masters a sort of passivity that makes his character a cipher, an object Bill Lee can impose his lover-of-my-dreams hopes on him. We, like Bill Lee, never quite know what’s going on with this chap.

But Craig is a vision of indulgence and semi-serious self-destruction as Lee, a born teller of tales even if Craig loses the New Orleans accent of his “Knives Out” gay detective Benoit Blanc.

“A curse,” he says of his sexuality, over-explaining to Eugene in his leap of faith moment. “Been in my father’s family for generations.”

The tropes of a gay “journey of discovery” are suggested here, but by and large eschewed, aside from Lee’s complaints of his life “of grotesque misery and humiliation.”

The best thing about Craig’s take on Burroughs is all the things he’s not — the gun-slinging hellion, indulgent junkie, or the weary, seen-and-done-it-all old man familiar from interviews and chat shows, often folded into versions of Burroughs on the screen.

The narrative may dawdle, the anachronistic music contributes to a disorienting disconnect and there may be too much of a suggestion that “love” is one-sided thing, first to last. Guadagnino’s ” romances”seem to lean that way.

But Craig’s performance more than compensates for those shortcomings, a 50ish gay man “liberated” in an alien city far from his own, a Nirvana where “Queer” gringos could be themselves, find true love or something they can hope will measure up, and where addicts could “discover” new interior frontiers, or indulge themselves to death, if their misery or lack of willpower so ordained it.

Rating: R, drug abuse, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman and Lesley Manville.

Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, based on the novel by William S. Burroughs. An A24 release.

Running Time: 2:17