Like it or not, fall 2022 appears to be the season of Harry Styles. He’s been discussed ad infinitum in the most overexposed film in memory and also this one, “My Policeman,” helmed by English theater director Michael Grandage. On the press trail, Styles informed us that this film about the decades-spanning relationship between Tom, a closeted cop (Styles); art curator Patrick; and Emma Corrin as Tom’s long-suffering wife Marion, is not “a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”

If you say so, but the way he seems to read his own movie suggests he didn’t understand the assignment. That’s reflected in a performance that registers as a blank beyond inscrutable gazes and sappy breakdowns. To play a repressed gay man involved in a steamy, behind-closed-doors affair requires levels of complexity and conveying inner turmoil that Styles can’t provide.