Whether you choose to embrace “The Sunset Limited,” a film premiering Saturday on HBO, largely will depend on if you’re willing to watch a couple of guys sit in a room and talk to each other for 90 minutes.

It helps that the guys are Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones, two of the most magnetic actors of our generation. But still, there’s just the one room. And all that talking.

Based on a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, “The Sunset Limited” examines the relationship between strangers brought together by desperate circumstances. As the film opens, a man simply referred to as “Professor” (Jones) has just tried to hurl himself in front of a train in a New York subway station. The suicide attempt, however, was thwarted by a maintenance man (Jackson) intent on saving the distraught Professor.

Only the Professor doesn’t want to be saved, and when the men wind up in the rescuer’s tenement apartment, he explains why. As it turns out, he’s a tormented, jaded loner who doesn’t see the point in living. That mystifies the rescuer, an ex-convict and born-again Christian.

What ensues is a robust philosophical debate that has one man trying to connect on a rational, emotional and spiritual level and the other steadfastly clinging to his bleak outlook on life.

“What you got against being happy?” asks the host.

“Suffering and human destiny is the same thing,” replies the other.

Both actors deliver perfectly pitched performances, but Jackson has the showier role. He’s the furnace that stokes the story, giving it heat as he expounds the virtues of faith with a steely determination. Jones, meanwhile, presents the ardent, yet measured, case of an academic with a constant look of resignation etched into his pained face.

Viewers turned off by the bitterly boisterous, superficial and often one-sided confrontations on the cable news channels might find “The Sunset Limited” to be refreshing in some ways. What, a deep-rooted discussion with a healthy give-and-take? On television?

That said, anyone familiar with McCarthy’s work realizes he isn’t exactly Mr. Sunshine. This is dark, often morose stuff. Moreover, it’s stuff most of us have heard before — in some form or another — in lecture halls or in church on Sundays.

‘The Sunset Limited’

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Where: HBO

‘The Sunset Limited’

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Where: HBO