David Jonsson (left) and director Francis Lawrence discuss their film, "The Long Walk," during the Lionsgate presentation at CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

Francis Lawrence’s film version of Stephen King’s 1979 story, “The Long Walk,” presents the cinematic transformation of a novel, believed for decades to be unfilmable, into a movie that rewards and punishes its audience in equal measure.

The film begins by showing us a letter that young men nationwide will be receiving in the near future, announcing what an honor it is to take part in The Long Walk, a contest where they would be representing their state and competing against 50 others.

The rules of the contest are simple: You must walk without ever stopping with a wristband reminding the contestant to remain at a steady speed of 3 mph. The last contestant standing wins, while any opponent who stops, even to take a break for a short period, will be immediately executed by gunfire.

Ray Garraty (played by Cooper Hoffman of “Licorice Pizza”) and Peter McVries (played by “Alien: Romulus” scene-stealer David Jonsson) are the most promising and outgoing of the contestants, who greet the others partaking in “The Long Walk” with a weary sadness but an undeniable sense of brotherhood.

We meet the Major (played by an unrecognizable Mark Hamill), the vicious overlord of this world, who reminds the contestants that this is a game of life or death.

The Major fires his gun into the air, and we’re off. While Peter appears focused and intent to win the contest by simply pacing himself, Ray is participating with a secret agenda and an entirely different determination for winning.

King wrote “The Long Walk” around 1966 and has stated that, although it wouldn’t be published until 1979 after he made a name for himself with “Carrie,” it was the first book he ever wrote. Considering the time frame in which he constructed “The Long Walk,” it can be assumed that King was thinking of the Vietnam draft and how that affected men throughout this country.

While the film is suspenseful enough on the surface, King’s existentialist themes of embracing every moment of life and finding comradery under pressure make the Vietnam soldier analogy impossible to ignore.

For decades, I assumed there would never be a movie made from King’s novel (which was tucked into his “The Bachman Books” collection), and not because of the violence but due to how internal and literary the tale is. When I think back to the story, I recall King’s agonizing details of bunions and heel sores burning until the contestant couldn’t possibly take another step.

Lawrence, who helmed some installments of the similar but comparably wimpy “The Hunger Games,” has reversed the tendency of those films to look away from the violence and water down the material for mainstream audiences. It’s a bold, necessary touch, that the camera leans in on the specifics of the physical horror and the lives lost. Most horror films are indifferent and even celebratory about the carnage inflicted but not this one.

The film “The Long Walk” resembles the most is, strangely, “Stand By Me” (1986), the Rob Reiner-directed King drama about four boys who go on a life-changing hike to uncover the body of a boy hit by a train. That film, like this one, is driven by extraordinary performances, sensitive handling of tricky material and manages to be cinematic, despite it simply being four people walking and talking for most of the movie.

The ending of King’s story has been altered, but in a way that is (no spoilers here) satisfying without being anywhere near a cop-out. Hoffman and Jonsson give two of the year’s best performances, though there’s also no forgetting Hamill’s nightmarish villainy and Judy Greer’s crushing humanity as Ray’s mother.

It’s impossible not to get caught up in the emotional stakes, as well as the physical ones depicted. The contestants represent a microcosm of America (a somewhat forced notion that results in generalizations, the film’s greatest flaw) but I always cared about their fate. “The Long Walk” is grim enough to be hard to recommend for everyone but offers a compassionate and riveting tale that will haunt you long afterwards.

(3 stars out of four)

Barry Wurst II is the founder of the Hawaii Film Critics Society and teaches film classes at University of Hawai’i Maui College.