As a P.K. Dick fan - why didn't I like this movie more?

I must admit, Radio Free Albemuth is one of the few P.K. Dick novels I haven't read. I even read "Voices from the Street" and (one of my favorite) "Confessions of a Crap Artist", though these belong to Dick's earlier "serious" writing phase.
I sincerely enjoy all his shortstories and have the complete collection, which I read several times by now. "The Commuter", "The Electric Ant" and "The Golden Man" being my favorite ones of his short stories. I'm not writing this to boast my P.K. Dick knowledge, but so you can get an idea of my taste in the his writings.

I also own "In pursuit of Valis", so I've read a lot of the Albemuth story from his diaries or "Exegesis". This novel (Radio Free Albemuth) is highly autobiographical, it seems. But I find it difficult to like the movie, even though it touches on all the topics that make Dick's story great. However, it doesn't chime with me, and I think that has a lotto do with the pacing and the background of these characters. They are just not convincing as P.K. Dick characters to me. Why not? Because they are too serious. Something about Dick's books and stories is an undercurrent of humor, a sense of self-mockery and disbelief in the author himself; as if he couldn't believe what he wanted to. From his torn perspective great stories and greater ideas arose. I can cherish some of the ideas in this movie, but there are no scenes that got me deeply thinking.

After reading his short stories for the first time I was often baffled and needed some minutes to process and put his thoughts into my own perspective. There were often lucid moments, not only when I read his stories, but especially when I thought about them. They have mutliple dimensions or levels to view them at and nothing in a Dick story is ever what it seems. That's maybe what I'm missing in this movie. It's all to clear, nobody goes crazy from loneliness or simply gives up. The P.K. Dick in this movie is maybe, how P.K Dick pictured himself back then - it's probably faithful to the book, but he is a much too smooth version of the man, for my tastes.

Yet, I still don't know what makes this movie only average. It seems too bland and one-way for a P.K. Dick story. Or "covenient", as Dick's character says about the Valis construct in the movie. It just seems this was a really hard choice to pick for a P.K.Dick adaptation. I didn't like the Hollywood treatment of most of Dick's work and feel that only Blade Runner actually managed to capture one of his stories pretty good. Dick's work isn't great for movie adaptations, I think in order to be successful they need to move away from the core material a little and make it their own. Even when the movie is pretty faithful to the original material, like "A Scanner Darkly", there is alwas too much emphasis on the plot and not on character. Dick's characters are so great, because of what they let us feel and experience when they are not talking. We understand these character's actions, we feel for them and perhaps even pity them. The typical P.K Dick hero to me is someone, who at his core, believes he will fail. This chirpy optimism of winning against all odds is not fitting with the way I see a lot of Dicks characters. They struggle and try, but in the end they usually fail in one way or the other. Thinking about it, I believe they often fail on the human level, but they don't fail their ideas and they don't give up.

Somehow all of that was present in this movie, too, but the script didn't try to work out that dichotomy between the real world and the ideal world. There was no struggle in these characters and they came across as a bit of know-it all. Still having trouble figuringout what was wrong with this movie, but I still can't tell. All I know is that if you want to do justice to a P.K. Dick story, you probably need to move away from it a little bit, like Blade Runner did.