“Primetime” is a “heavily fictionalized” account of “Dateline NBC’s” notorious, pedophile-entrapping “To Catch a Predator” series of hidden camera “gotchas” passed off as “reports” in the early 2000s.

It’s a film that struggles to condemn and illuminate why TV news and police “stings” that in essence create a crime are immoral and wrong without coming off as defending pedophiles.

After all, we’ve got the accused pedophile president, GOP Congress and Supreme Court for that.

But it is built on some terrific performances, including a career-best by “Twilight” alumnus Robert Pattinson.

As troubled, ethically-challenged “Catch a Predator” anchor/reporter Chris Hansen, Pattinson gives us his first swaggering Movie Star turn ever as a cocky but stumbling striver haunted with some sort of “Catcher in the Rye” syndrome.

This Hansen sees himself as dedicated to hunting an “ancient evil,” child molestation. And he’s determined to make his name, his fame and his fortune via his “To Catch a Predator” “performances.”

At just the right moment, with a suspect identified by catfishing members of a pedophile-hunting Perverted Justice vigilante group and lured to a rented house to meet their under-age “hook-up,” Hansen would stride into the shot and confront the perp with a “What are you doing here?”

Matthew Maher (“Air”) brings a creepy verve to Perverted Justice crusader Xavier Von Erk. Von Erk and others, like idealistic “bait” Del (Phoebe Bridgers of “I Saw the TV Glow”), a twentysomething gamine who can role-play tween boys and tween girls, worm their way into pedophile online spaces and bait traps for adults who groom, molest and prey on children.

The film is seen basically through three sets of eyes — those of Hansen, struggling for stardom, stop cheating to save his marriage (Anna Faris plays his had-enough wife) — his show’s take-no-prisoners producer (Merritt Weaver of “Nurse Jackie,” knocking it out of the park) — and aspiring actor “bait” Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo (the latest Jimmy Olsen “Superman” sidekick).

Everybody involved has a queasiness about what they’re doing and how — at first. But the lure of fame and success is great, and even the guileless and under-coached “Bait Boy Dan” finds himself relishing the chance to “improvise” his way to a Screen Actor’s Guild card with his smiling, pushy performances.

Pattinson’s Hansen saves his self-righteous sneers for when he declares what they’re doing as “a form of activism,” and his smirks for the perps (Alex Winter, Tony Revolori, Bob Ari and Jonathan Lipnicki among them) when he strides into the trap with them, printouts of their criminally overt online come-ons to read from in his hand.

A crew member notes Hansen’s Emmy, his trench coat and his self-serious pose and mutters how Hansen “thinks he’s Mike ‘F—–g’ Wallace,” referencing TV’s original “crusading” poseur.

Director Lance Oppenheim (the Florida doc “Some Kind of Heaven” was his), working with an Ajon Singh script loosely based on an Esquire Magazine “To Catch a Predator” take-down article from 2007, immerses us in his characters’ agendas, which in Hansen’s case, borders on a mania.

We’re through the looking glass when we, like the “team” sense, they’re about to land “a whale” only to have a disabled and sexually twisted creep stagger out of car — a perp on crutches.

The film itself staggers as all involved try to decide whether it’s a horror tale of the hellish figures who prey on children all over the world, or a particularly American sort of Gothic comedy — a nation obsessed with pedophiles that elects a credibly accused one president.

Having former NBC News chief Jeff Zucker play himself as one of the villains of the piece is rich.

But with name changes (Hansen’s producer was not female, with no hint of a “crush” on the “star”), inventions and flights of fictional fancy, “Primetime” struggles for credibility the same way the unsavory show with good (?) intentions did.

The last thing this culture needs is a cinematic watering-down and fact-bending spin on pedophiles that, like the political debate over a political party’s pedophile protecting ethos, leaves the victims out of the equation.

The crusty Texas police chief (Bokeem Woodbine) the show embeds itself with may be a fictional character, but it allows the movie to score points about people who should be watchdogging law enforcement, not getting in bed with them. Still, the fact that this association, and the whole third act overreach “descent into a hell of our creation,” doesn’t come off hobbles the film.

It doesn’t spoil the powerhouse performances by Pattinson and Weaver. But it does tend to seriously lower the temperature of a tale intended as awards bait in this fall of 2026.

Rating: R, violence, pedophilia subject matter, full frontal nudity, profanity

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Weaver, Phoebe Bridgers, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Anna Faris, Alex Winter, Bokeem Woodbine and Jeff Zucker as himself.

Credits: Directed by Lance Oppenheim, scripted by Ajon Singh, based on an Esquire article by Luke Dittrich. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:50