Bloodworth

LITTLE ROCK — Bloodworth 87

Cast:

Reece Thompson, Kris Kristofferson, Hilary Duff, W. Earl Brown, Barry Corbin, Val Kilmer, Dwight Yoakam, Frances Conroy

Director:

Shane Dax Taylor

Rating:

R, for language, some violence and drug content

Running time:

105 minutes

Bloodworth is a somber family drama set in an obscure corner of Tennessee, about an old man who comes home after wandering 40 years as an itinerant musician. He has come home, we presume, to reconcile with and die surrounded by his family, a benighted bunch of Snopeses.

The movie is adapted from William Gay’s novel Provinces of Night, and while I didn’t reread the book before (or after) watching the film, it feels true to it. W. Earl Brown, a character actor best known as Dan Dority on HBO’s Deadwood series, wrote the screenplay, produced and plays a major role in the movie, which gets the details - the cadences and the shadows - right while transposing Gay’s novel from the 1950s into a kind of timeless near past. There is more than a trace of the gothic in Gay’s novel and the film, but the characters never cross the line in lazy caricature. The defining featureof the production might be a kind of fidelity to a species of recognizable reality - Bloodworth feels like a family myth you’ve heard since childhood, a story handed down through generations.

Kris Kristofferson, wizened and wizardly, is the absconded patriarch, E.F. Bloodworth, a singer who never hit the medium time, in part because of a stubborn, bumptious integrity. When Bloodworth took off, he left behind three young sons who grew up to be less than they might have otherwise. Warren (Val Kilmer) is a drunken womanizer who imagines himself a music promoter; Boyd (Dwight Yoakam) is a violent depressive whose wife has recently decamped to Nashville with another man (Shelton Williams, the musician grandson of the legendary Hank Williams who’s better known as Hank III); and Brady (Brown) is a bitter, Bible-quoting loonwho “hexes” his perceived enemies and is ferociously protective of the boys’ mother, Julia (Frances Conroy).

Boyd has a son, the literary-minded high school dropout Fleming (Reece Thompson), whom we first meet as he opens what appears to be the latest in a string of rejection letters from The Oxford American. Though Fleming has a teacher who believes in his talent, his father decidedly does not - sending him out to change the carburetor on the dilapidated Lincoln parked in the front yard. It’s Fleming with whom E.F. connects, two artists with some of the same impulse control problems: Fleming has recently embarked on a romance with Raven (a surprisingly tough Hilary Duff), the daughter of the town whore. But his muse might lead him elsewhere too.

What’s great about Bloodworth is its music - by Kristofferson and producer/music supervisor T Bone Burnett - and the intense but underplayed performances of most of the cast. Barry Corbin is wonderful in a small role, and while the ever dangerous Kilmer seems constantly to be fiddling with matches, he never burns down the movie.

Bloodworth is specific despite the echoes of myth that sound throughout. There are a few visually beautiful passages and nobody this side of Terrence Malick shoots sun-drizzled natural still life as well as cinematographer Tim Orr (who works a lot but may be primarily known as David Gordon Green’s favorite shooter).

Bloodworth’s debits, however, are real. As Fleming, Thompson doesn’t seem to fully register - at least he seems dull compared to his uncles. And the film - which, in early screenings was 45 minutes longer than the eventual theatrical cut - seems a little truncated.

Still, it’s a worthy film, one that might just find an audience in the way that Crazy Heart did and That Evening Sun, another movie based on Gay’s work, didn’t quite.