Hate Crime: THE ORDER

The Order is a tense and absorbing real-life thriller set against a backdrop of the American northwest, with stunning views of mountains and forests and rivers and farms on which plays out a standard procedural about good men with guns in pursuit of the bad men with guns. This gives it the feeling of a Western, albeit one with machine guns and pickup trucks from its mid-80’s milieu. It’s only fitting for a true crime story that’s about the very conflicts that continue to drive our country’s madness to take on the trappings of a genre that’s always about American identity. This picture finds an FBI agent (Jude Law) investigating the works of a white-supremacist militia. He’s a grizzled and exhausted veteran who rolls into town and soon teams up with a boyish local cop (Tye Sheridan) to start asking the right questions, and some wrong ones. The militia under suspicion is a recent breakaway group from a larger, slightly more sedate hate group. It’s led by a hot-headed extremist (Nicholas Hoult) who’s leading his small band of men in robberies and bombings, leading up to planned assassinations and more. Ominously, there’s a shot of blueprints for the United States capitol tacked up on his bulletin board. I half expected a title card at the end to tell us one of their group would go on decades later to storm it. Or be elected to Congress.

Director Justin Kurzel is a good fit for the material with his interest in man’s capacity for violence and the ways in which aimless men can bond over a sense of duty, misguided or not, that can emerge from its pursuit. (This makes for an interesting companion to Kurzel’s Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed, and True History of the Kelly Gang in its exploration of bloody codes of conduct and grim perspective.) He has a straight-faced somberness of tone and a steady grip on suspense erupting into violence. Here are long, crackling sequences of law enforcement jargon and investigation, jostling personalities behind the scenes of cops and criminals alike, and then the inevitable shootouts and bombings and chases. (There’s also an event that’ll be familiar to anyone who knows it inspired Oliver Stone’s electric underrated Talk Radio.) Kurzel moves the plot with a well-paced progression of clues and escalations, keeping a close eye on the revealing gestures of the performances. Law convincingly plays an older agent who was hoping to slow down, but finds he just can’t stay out of the game. He moves like an old pro, interrogates with a gruff edge, and runs with a hard-charging fervor that had me worried the character would give himself a heart attack. Sheridan is a fine youthful idealist coming into his own, making a fine pair with Law’s grizzled determination. (Jurnee Smollett is a good by-the-book third wheel when they call for backup.) They’re easy to root for. As their Hoult is scarily blank, a void of charisma that nonetheless has other racist young guys enthralled to his promise of a better, whiter America. There’s a sick dread to the FBI’s righteous pursuit of their group, as we know the sick appeal of their target's evil message will continue to linger past this particular flashpoint.