There’s a veritable NRA convention of ordnance discharged in “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s All American parable of “How did we get here?”

But the one weapon not discharged is the most apt metaphor for the latest from the writer/director of “Midsommar,” “Hereditary” and the Joaquin Phoenix puzzle “Beau is Afraid.” “Eddington” is a shotgun of a movie, aiming at many targets and trying to hit them with all the randomness of a 12 gauge shell full of pellets.

It’s kind of a mess, but an ambitious one hitting on themes Aster’s fans will recognize as his favorites. And as Aster scores points on conspiracy-obsessed America, cultish America, gun-fetishizing America, virtue signalling America and the limits of “back the blue,” he’s pretty much earned the right to be heard out, if not the benefit of the doubt.

The microcosm of society here is a tiny, dying New Mexico town where the longtime sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) has come up with a laundry list of reasons why he won’t wear a mask as the country shuts down and the “mask to stop the spread of COVID and save lives” vs “I ain’t maskin’ cuz FREEDOM” divide opens up.

Sheriff Joe Cross (subtle) defies the statewide mandate in front of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and others, a version of the last straw between these two locals who have history, which is connected to Cross’s fragile, conspiracy-crank wife (Emma Stone).

Not many people respect the sheriff. We’ve seen a crazed homeless man (a nearly unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) drop him and evade capture in front of a city council meeting at the mayor’s closed-by-COVID bar. And we’ve met the last deputies (Michael Ward and Luke Grimes) who will work for Cross, and let’s just say they’re not exactly White Sands test-facility job candidates.

The mayor’s gay punk son (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and others like live-streaming the sheriff as he stumbles through his duties and tries to control his temper and hide his cluelessness. Popularly elected or not, the town has grown jaded on him, and one suspects the mask thing is about more than “I have asthma.” He’s ready to run for mayor on a “How did we get here?” anti-mask, “There IS no COVID in Eddinton” platform.

His “getting better” but dark web-obsessed wife and her even crazier mother (Deidre O’Connell) have fallen in with a charismatic “How the world REALLY works” cult leader (Austin Butler).

There’s a big data processing facility that promises to “bring jobs” and suck the local aquifer dry as it makes crypto-dolts temporarily rich. That’s another issue in a Cross “campaign” run by attacking everyhing the mayor is for, and by enlisting his two county-payroll deputies (there is no dispatcher) as campaign workers.

He’s decorated his Sevilla Co. sheriff’s dept. SUV with print-shop misspelled slogans, an effort that takes an even darker turn a we see the suspicious bursts of violence inserted into nationwide Black Lives Matter protests which Fox News, the sheriff and the old and white electorate insist are “George Soros backed…antifa terrorists.”

National TV coverage will bleed into Eddington’s politics and everything we saw in Minneapolis, Portland and elsewhere will play out on a smaller scale in this not-quite-empty town on the edge of an Indian reservation which has tribal/pueblo police jurisdiction issues with the law-unto-himself sherrif.

Blood will be spilled and the viewer will be jolted at how quickly and how wide the schism between the “free-dumb” crowd, and the “woke,” sane and often annoying virtue signallers — from the unseen governor on down to high school white guilt agitator Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), whom Brian (Cameron Mann) obsesses over, whom his gay bestie Eric the mayor’s son (Hidaka) toys with and who has “history” with one of the deputies.

If that reads like a LOT of plot and characters and agendas, it is. Aster has as much keeping them straight as we do.

So it’s almost natural that the third act descends into bloody first-person-shooter video-game styled mayhem, with under-identified outsider-snipers, the pueblo police, the sheriff and others caught up in it.

There’s nothing like raid-a-gun-shop wanton slaughter to thin out a cast and simplify a plot contrived to show America along its fault lines.

Phoenix is settling into middle aged man roles well enough, and he makes this simple man with the power of life and death over everybody alarmingly his own. Cross seems depressed, barely holding it together. And he’s armed and like all law enforcement, knows just what he can get away with. Pascal gives a shallow, shiny political sheen to the mayor that makes a nice contrast.

Stone and O’Connell border on parodies of conspiracy cranks, a group beyond parody. The younger players play up the fickle nature of “politics” among teens just learning to be outraged, sometimes just to attract the cute girl who’s outraged herself.

And Collins staggers through the picture, the personification of that insoluable problem no one wants to deal with or see. The mentally ill homeless? Sure. But he could also be a stand-in for victims and perpetrators of violence or for a schizophrenic country that’s lost its collective mind, and its way.

Making sense of it all on Aster’s behalf is hard enough. But “Eddington” runs up against a challenge even he can’t have forseen. It’s just unlikeable, with unpleasant characters, unpunished wrongs and wanton violence as a shortcut to unraveling any quandary or mystery.

Holding up a mirror like this was never going to win a lot of friends. Aster so stuffs that mirror with ugliness that “Eddington” is harder to take than it is to decipher.

If he knew more about firearms, he’d have recognized these targets as more suitable to precision — sniper rifles — and not his shotgun-hope-I-hit-something approach.

Rating: R, graphic violence, explicit nudity, profanity

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deidre O’Connell, Michael Ward, Luke Grimes, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Amélie Hoeferle, Cameron Mann, Austin Butler and Clifton Collins, Jr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:25