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It’s been six years since Matthew McConaughey starred in a film, and while you watch “The Rivals of Amziah King,” it’s straightforward to see why this was the one which lured him again. It provides him a task that matches his scraggly aging-bad-boy redneck attraction like a glove — and, on the similar time, it’s completely different from something he’s ever executed.

The movie itself is completely different from something you’ve ever seen, in methods each good (the primary half) and never nearly as good (the second half doesn’t all the time parse). But there’s an audacity to the film, which is a neorealist beekeeper musical Western revenge fable, that will get inside your system. The director, Andrew Patterson, has a imaginative and prescient — of life, and of methods to inform a narrative — that he enacts with a lot confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t completely work, you might end up going with it, as a result of that is what impartial filmmaking is about: unfurling a narrative on the excessive wire.

Patterson cuts corners, typically in a precocious method, however he is aware of precisely what he’s doing together with his actors. He will get a magnetic end up of McConaughey and showcases a brand new performer, the Native actor Angelina LookingGlass (that is her very first credit score), and you might come away considering that she’s a star. She’s radiant and sly and delicate and charming. She carries you thru this heartland drama that’s reality-based and, on the similar time, a figuring out film fairy story.

It’s set in rural Oklahoma, the place McConaughey performs Aziah King, a veteran honey maker who’s a born-again Christian and a little bit of a damaged man (he’s a widower with a coronary heart situation), although we will see that he relishes his life. Within the opening scene, Aziah and his friends collect within the car parking zone of a neighborhood fast-food drive-in, the place they take out their devices and launch right into a bluegrass efficiency, regardless that nobody is there to hearken to them. That’s okay; they’re taking part in for themselves. And the music has a scruffy pleasure to it. They sound like Mumford and Sons if that band had by no means gone skilled.

Some native police method Aziah as a result of they need his help. The cops discovered a truck carrying 20 barrels of stolen honey price 1 / 4 of one million {dollars}. Can Aziah assist them establish the place the honey got here from? That sounds just like the set-up for an offbeat thriller, however one thing much more offbeat occurs: As Aziah revs up his honey excavator (a machine that whirs with deadly velocity), one in all his musician friends (Tony Revolori) leans his head in slightly too shut, and the machine scalps him, ripping off his hair and pony tail and the layer of pores and skin connected to it. The sequence that follows (getting him to the hospital, and fishing the scalp out of the excavator) is without delay queasy, humorous, and gripping in a shit occurs form of method, and it units the tone for all that follows. It is a film that operates by scalping our expectations.

At a diner the morning after, Amziah appears up on the waitress serving him espresso, and it’s none apart from Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), who lived with Amziah and his spouse for 2 years as a foster youngster when she was 8 and 9. She was taken away after Amziah’s spouse died, and the 2 haven’t seen one another since. However the best way that Patterson establishes the persistence of their connection, merely from how they have a look at one another, is the signal of a humanist filmmaker. Amziah, lonely, gives to take Kateri on and train her the honey enterprise, and this can be a film that permits you to contact the eccentric soul of that enterprise — a calling, actually — as certainly as “Ulee’s Gold” or the Macedonian documentary “Honeyland” did.

You’ll be able to really feel McConuaghey’s delight as he chows down on the scene the place Amziah takes Kateri to a potluck and explains the that means of every dish. Or the one the place he and his friends, who embody a wily Rob Morgan and an angelic long-haired barefoot Owen McTeague, collect in Amziah’s kitchen to play one other musical quantity, this time with Kateri singing alongside — which she finds an obnoxiously intrusive request till she begins doing it, at which level the movie appears to be rediscovering what taking part in music will be: the shared rapture of strange folks. For its opening 45 minutes or so, “The Rivals of Amziah King” revels in a grounded imaginative and prescient of happiness.

However, after all, it’s too good to final. In the course of studying the honey enterprise, Kateri wanders one morning over to the rows of bins that comprise Amziah’s hives, and he or she discovers that they’ve all been stolen. I can’t reveal what occurs subsequent, however suffice to say that it quickly falls to Kateri to begin operating the enterprise. And that isn’t going to work (there’s $30,000 in debt) until she will be able to retrieve these stolen hives, a course of that can lead her right into a hornet’s nest of native corruption.

To look at and benefit from the second half of “The Rivals of Amziah King,” it’s important to settle for that Kateri, who appeared so harmless at first, turns into a stealth heroine. She will get assist from Oat (Jake Horowitz), a geek operator at her previous job, in addition to Cole Sprouse because the closest factor right here to a dashing younger main man. Largely, although, it’s as much as Kateri to pursue her lone justice, which she does with an absence of regret that’s stunning. Then once more, you would possibly say that the flip facet of the movie’s feel-good Christian benevolence is its eye-for-an-eye ruthlessness. And when Kurt Russell, trying like he’s warming as much as star in “The Steve Bannon Story,” reveals up as a neighborhood honey baron who’s as rapacious, in his method, as John Huston in “Chinatown,” we’re able to see him get what’s coming to him.

An even bigger problem with the movie’s second half is that John Montague’s screenplay drifts away from plausibility. But at the same time as that’s occurring, Patterson phases all of it with a precociousness that retains the movie knowingly off-balance. And it’s Angelina LookingGlass who makes the film’s deadly gamesmanship work at the same time as you’re peering by way of the holes in its suspense storytelling. Her charismatic poker-faced resolve incarnates the movie’s message, which is that in a few of the conditions life palms out, you’ve received to be merciless to be type.