Lawless grunts through moonshine saga

Start with Boardwalk Empire. Move the story south to Virginia. Take away the dapper suits and sub in some drab clothes made of itchy burlap and tweed. Funnel the illegal booze from brown bottles to Mason jars. Finally, dumb down the witty dialogue until it is all monosyllables of grunted half-muted barks; think cavemen with cotton in their cheeks.

And voila, you have just made Lawless, a mediocre, but amusing, period piece about the perils of living in backwoods hamlets, where moonshinin’ is a way of life and a family tradition.

The film is about the Bondurant brothers, who operate an army of stills in the rural hills of Virginia during Prohibition in the 1920s. The story focuses most of its attention on Jack Bondurant (Shia LaBeouf), the runt of the fiercely loyal and often pugnacious Bondurant clan. He’s given little responsibility because his brothers think he’s weak and vulnerable — and they’re right. Then there’s Howard (Jason Clarke), a menacing figure the movie forgets to mention or give speaking lines to. The leader is Forrest (Tom Hardy), a cold and calculating hillbilly with considerable patience and ruthlessness. I realize the term “hillbilly” is considered derogatory to some, a badge of honor for others. Forrest falls in the latter category.

The Bondurants run moonshine in and out of Virginia, which is all fine and dandy to the local police who often purchase their signature White Lightning by the caseload. When a slimy federal agent (Guy Pearce) turns up wanting a cut of the brothers’ action, it sets off a moonshine war that envelopes Forrest and his pig-headedness, and also Jack and his sibling rivalry.

There’s plenty more to discover in Lawless, though, including a Chicago dancer turned vittles-chef (Jessica Chastain), a preacher’s daughter who looks too young to be courted by even the youngest Bondurant, a Tommy-gun toting gangster (Gary Oldman) and loads of punishing and brutal violence. My guest at the screening watched between closed fingers.

Lawless is filmed in dull browns and grays, giving the film an earthy, organic quality, as if the weeds are going to grow up over these characters if they sit still too long, which is an interesting dynamic considering these characters mosey about at their own pace. The movie was shot in Georgia and it benefits from some interesting locations, including a brewing shack that seems to have been overtaken by trees and vines. The cars are also a nice touch, including a spiffy V8 that Jack earns from his hard-fought alcohol sales.

This gritty look, along with the exotic backwoods locations and those ratty clothes, are nothing, though, compared to the vocal inflections and accents of the characters. They speak in broken grunts and throaty exhales. (It’s all in English, but I was secretly wishing for subtitles like that horrendous TV show, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.) It was hard to understand, but the raspy backwoods dialects were impressive and they give the film a distinct brand of authenticity. Hardy’s voice is especially good. Most audiences will still have Hardy’s impeccably polite Victorian accent stuck in their heads from The Dark Knight Rises, and here he is doing a whole new routine with equally impressive results.

The movie is really a fiend for little details like that. The shacks feel lived in, the copper stills don’t just look hot but feel hot, the language evokes generations of rural living, the clothing is worn and scrappy — these are things that transport us into the world of the film. Notice the federal agent and all his small details: the immaculate leather gloves, the haircut with a center part made of an inch of baldness, the way the other characters smell perfume on him. This man is a foreigner to them, as much as they are foreigners to him, and this isolates his rage and hatred.

I liked the look and feel of Lawless, but I did not much care for the story. I was never sure who the star was, LaBeouf or Hardy. Both of their characters are gifted with the Bondurant curse of stubbornness, which never allows for much growth within the plot. Hardy chews on the scenes the way he’s supposed to, but he’s never given much to do. Then LaBeouf seems to hijack the plot midway through as the film changes from a gothic moonshine saga — think William Faulkner writing an existential Al Capone — to wham-bam action movie with chase sequences, fistfights and music montages. LaBeouf’s Jack spends much of the movie wanting to be his brothers, both ruthless savages. He begins the film as an irresponsible kid and ends it as an irresponsible kid who can now kill without guilt. What kind of story is that?

The director is Australian John Hillcoat, whose last two films — The Proposition and The Road, both marvelous — benefited with small casts and more precise narratives. Lawless has a large cast and, at times, it seems to sag under the weight of all its characters. Hillcoat often collaborates with musician Nick Cave, who wrote the script here. Cave’s story — based on Matt Bondurant’s book The Wettest County in the World — has a lot of nuance and is sprinkled with gloomy humor. I liked the dialogue, and the actors performing it, but I wanted the story to be tighter and more in control of the narrative. It’s not a bad movie, though it is occasionally slow as it meanders around with nothing to do.

Now, I mentioned HBO’s Boardwalk Empire up top. It is a similar story told in a similar way. Comparing a movie like Lawless to a show like Empire might not be fair, but after seeing Lawless all I wanted to do was watch a better version of the movie but on television.