How does one make a movie about Elvis Presley that mentions The King precisely once? By creating a fantasy about a fictional character who looks and sounds like Presley and has a career very much like his—but isn’t him. That’s the conceit of “The Identical,” a title that not too subtly suggests the gross similarities while literally pointing toward something else.

That “something” is the notion that Drexel Hemsley, the Presley surrogate of Howard Klausner’s script, is one of a pair of twins separated just after birth. Jumping off from the fact that Elvis did in fact have a stillborn twin, the movie presumes that Hemsley’s brother survived but—because in the midst of the Depression their hardscrabble parents Bill and Helen (Brian Geraghty and Amanda Crews) were unable to support them both—was given to a childless couple, traveling preacher Reece Wade (Ray Liotta) and his wife Louise (Ashley Judd), to raise as their own son Ryan (Noah Urrea as a nine-year old, Blake Rayne as a grown-up). It’s Ryan who’s the focus of the movie; Drexel, who becomes a music superstar, is kept in the background, surfacing occasionally on wall calendars and LP covers and in occasional cameo moments, looking somber in supposedly mythic poses that the impassive Rayne can’t really command.

The big crisis Ryan faces is the tension between his love of singing and his father’s insistence that the boy should follow in his clerical footsteps. It’s a choice that’s dramatized in the crudest, most obvious ways. Ryan sneaks out of the house with his goofy neighbor Dino (Seth Green) to visit a roadside honky-tonk where African-American bands play music that the boy immediately becomes fascinated with and copies. (Naturally, since this is the south in the fifties, a redneck sheriff shows up at one point to close down the place and deliver the boys—as well as Jenny, the sweet girl played by Erin Cottrell that Ryan hooks up with there—into the hands of their uniformly disapproving parents.) Meanwhile Reece, as portrayed at the higher end of the histrionic spectrum by Liotta, pushes Ryan to attend a fundamentalist college to study the Bible, but ultimately the boy rebels, courteously, and goes off into the secular world.

Of course, by this time the striking similarity of Ryan to the famous Drexel Hemsley (as well as his ability to match the megastar’s voice) is noticed by virtually everybody, including the guy’s boss Avid (Joe Pantoliano), a mechanic transplanted from the north who’s a big Drexel fan. The narrative stumbles through Ryan’s stint in the army, an accidental visit with Drexel’s dying mother and his wooing of Jenny before making its way laboriously to a contest for guys emulating Hemsley’s signature performance moves, which Jenny and Avi prod Ryan to enter. He wins and becomes “The Identical,” a Drexel impersonator who draws crowds by singing Hemsley’s hits. His success is threatened, however, when he tries to insert his own numbers into the act.

There’s a weirdness to the movie, which is slackly directed by Dustin Marcellino, that it never shakes—specifically, the whole twin business, which rather ghoulishly ties the invented story to Presley’s biography. One can imagine the script excising the business altogether (which would have had the advantage of losing the whole Depression-era prologue, which is pretty terrible) and simply being built around a guy without a blood connection to Hemsley who nonetheless looked and sounded like him—an idea that might have made for a more interesting character study. Of course, then the picture would have lost the inspirational pieties about accepting who you are and reconciling with those who made hurtful decisions in the past that were probably in the minds of those financing the project. (This is a faith-based project, though a pretty strange one.)

And even with such a fundamental change, “The Identical” would still suffer from Rayne’s dull performance, which captures Presley’s look but none of his magnetism or charisma. Judd does the sweet, supportive mom bit decently enough, but Liotta—who also shares an executive producer credit—tries too hard. (In the later stages, he also sports poor old-age makeup. “Boyhood” is already spoiling us in that respect.) Pantoliano and Green both go the exaggerated comic-relief route without appreciable success. Technically the picture has the plastic period authenticity of a low-budget made-for-cable movie, though Karl Walter Lindenlaub’s cinematography is okay. But the songs, manufactured by Christopher Carmichael, Jerry Marcellino and Jochanan Marcellino to mimic Presley hits, are pretty pale reflections of the real thing.

The basic premise behind “The Identical” is actually fairly interesting. Unfortunately, it’s been poorly worked out and clumsily executed.