Lawless Movie Review

Director John Hillcoat and screenplay writer Nick Cave of The Road and other films brings us a gritty, Prohibition Era, America-before-it-was-America story called Lawless, based on Mount Vernon High School-alum and author Matt Bonderant’s fictionalized account of his ancestors’ adventures producing and selling moonshine in the hills of Franklin County, VA. Franklin County (no city is ever named) has one of just about everything (think the town in Winter’s Bone): one church, one market, one road, and one law of the land: whatever you can negotiate with the authorities, goes. The county becomes sort of an industry town for the production and distribution of moonshine, with police officers willing to turn a blind eye in return for a few cases of moonshine. The kingpins of the business are the three Bandarant brothers: Forrest (played by Tom Hardy), the strong-but-silent eldest brother whose toughness and stoic are legendary in the county; Howard (Jack Clarke), heavy-hitting and heavy-drinking, and Jack (Shia LaBeouf), the youngest, whose chief insecurity, not unlike other youngest siblings, is that he’ll never be like his brothers.

The movie make its first turn when corrupt Special Deputy Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), on special assignment from Chicago, drives to the boys’ farm to inform them that the county wants a cut of their moonshine profits, and are willing to shut their stills down if they don’t get what is asked. Forrest, in true Bandarant form, curtly informs him right back that Bandarants have been making moonshine interference-free since time began, and they don’t intend on starting now. This first showdown sets the stage for the rest of the film, thoroughly enjoyable if you like blood-soaked, repetitive attack-seek revenge sequences, the inevitable drama in movies like this.

The movie is far from one-dimensional: underlying the throat slitting and graphic castrations is a truly beautiful, if a little cliched, young romance between Jack, the rough-and-tumble Bandarant, and the local priest’s daughter, Bertha (Mia Wasikowska), whose pure beauty is accentuated by a cloistered fondness for bad boys. Their romance reaches a head, however, when Jack brings Bertha to see the brothers’ moonshine distillery hidden deep in the woods. Little do they know that the authorities have followed them there. In the ensuing gun fight, the boys’ distillery is destroyed and their crippled assistant Cricket (Dane Dehaan) is killed, his neck broken by the scathingly-evil Rakes, whose villainy is exceptionally well done (and may very well garner him award nominations in the coming months).

Jack’s anger towards Rakes and the authorities who conducted the raid is the last rock to fall in the slow erosion of his youth. No longer the runt of the litter, tortured by the injustice committed by the police, he leaves his home in his car, armed with a handgun, to take revenge. His brothers, and other local townspeople who conveniently have been waiting by their cars, follow with their own vehicles and weapons to fight the last fight against Rakes and his troupe who are waiting on one side of the town’s covered bridge for anyone to dare and cross, setting up the inevitable denouement in this war of attrition. Jack and Forrest are wounded in the crossfire, but just before Rakes comes over to finish them off, he is shot by his own deputies, the final result of a growing feud between he, the fancy-boy Chicago enforcer, and the rest of the police force whose own loyalties have always laid with Franklin County and the moonshiners. Rakes limps off, swearing about “hicks” and “ignorant hillbillies.” Jack follows, and vindicates himself as a true Bandarant by shooting Rakes, killing him as he crosses the covered bridge.



If “Lawless” fails to make it on the mantle of the finest Prohibition-era movies to be made, it’s because critics will observe that the story line lacks distinction and body; a few distracting elements make the movie too long; and it wraps up just a little too easy. My take: Shia LaBeouf puts on a stellar performance, his best potentially ever. Tom Hardy is absolutely brilliant, reprising a bit the voice of Bane but with a greater delicacy and intent. The soundtrack is sort of the sixth man in the film, the haunting voices of Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson whispering to viewers that they too are trespassing on sacred earth, the Bonderant’s Appalachia. My sense is that this movie, like a good moonshine, will age well. Well worth your time to see it!

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