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Earnestness is the main virtue of “Mao’s Last Dancer,” and it’s not enough. Bruce Beresford’s biographical picture about Li Cunxin, a Chinese ballet star who defected to the United States in 1981 to the consternation of a Communist regime that had only recently regularized relations with America, is obviously sincere and well intentioned but, coming from such an experienced director, oddly amateurish.

Based on Li’s autobiography, the film begins with his childhood and early training in China, easily its most effective portion (perhaps because since the dialogue is in Mandarin, it comes across as less stilted). He was the son of a large and impoverished family in a rural district, and in 1972, when he was an eleven-year old (played by Huang Wenbin) in a one-room schoolhouse, he was chosen by state officials searching for potential talent to audition for the dance academy in Beijing. Played as a teenager by the agile Guo Chengwu, he excels under the guidance of a kindly old teacher named Chan (Zhang Su), although other members of the faculty are far more unyielding.

At the urging of visiting Brit Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), artistic director of the Houston Ballet, the regime is persuaded to allow Li to come to his company as an exchange student, and it’s here that “Mao’s Last Dancer” begins to deteriorate. Chi Cao, who takes over the role of Li as an adult, proves an excellent dancer, but as an actor he’s stiff, and the material he must deal with is stiffer still. First there’s a romance with a young colleague, Elizabeth (Amanda Schull), that’s about as deep as a piece out of Teen Beat. Then there’s a Big Professional Moment when Li’s selected to appear in a live television broadcast of “Die Fledermaus” (huh?) before an audience of luminaries, and then freezes briefly in front of the cameras before triumphing. Another romance, with an Australian dancer (Carmilla Vergotis) follows, though the relationship is undermined by the difference in their abilities.

All of this has the feel of soap opera, and clumsy soap opera at that; and it’s not alleviated by the dancing or the acting, even by the usually reliable Greenwood, who’s so flamboyantly twee that he turns Stevenson into a caricature. Better work comes from Kyle MacLachlan as a Texas lawyer who intervenes when Li decides to ask for asylum after being told to return home and the Chinese consulate reacts by effectively taking him prisoner. But the entire controversy over his defection isn’t handled with the clarity it needs, and the ensuing estrangement of Li from his homeland is treated with an almost cavalier air—until an accommodation is reached that includes a reunion with his parents that recalls nothing more than Barry Fitzgerald’s final scene in “Going My Way.” (It works beautifully there, but once again seems retro here.) And as if that weren’t enough, there follows a reunion with kindly old Chan, too.

Li Cunxin’s story has the makings of a fascinating film, but it needs more toughness than Beresford brings to it. “Mao’s Last Dancer” winds up as a well-meaning but bland picture that shortchanges its subject.