“Clovers” is a documentary parked somewhere between the quaint and goofy charms of “Vernon, Florida” and the toxic redneck stupidity of “Red, White and Wasted” on the movie map of America’s real “Americana.”

It started out as an essay on “the fastest dying town in America,” Asheboro, N.C. and evolved into a portrait of the denizens of a strip mall “internet cafe” aka “trailer park casino” named Clovers.

The movie isn’t about race, as Black and white women and white men mix and mingle and gamble and hit the honky tonk biker bar to dance to a cover band playing Nazarethe’s “Hair of the Dog.” It’s about class, the self-destructive Southern white lower classes in particular.

We meet low-stakes/low-rent gamblers whose latest bad impulse and life-worsening decision has drawn them to the video games and digital slot machines of the “might be illegal” gambling parlor Clovers, a joint that’s the temporary beneficiary of the sort of lax enforcement infamous in rural Southern policing.

The film follows Jennifer Paschal, a Randolph County corrections officer, as she jokes around with inmates and lets sexist insults, bizarre and threatening behavior roll off her back in a job that she loves.

“Y’all QUIT,” she orders the men behaving badly in the orange jumpsuits.

Jennifer is just shy of 40, bubbly and quick to draw a contrast with her colleagues whom she says “hate” this job in “hell.” Not her. She likes the paychecks, keeps the peace her own way and has support at home.

“My husband’s been to prison,” she explains. “He knows what happens here!”

We never learn why she’s “let go” from the best job somebody with her education and circumstances could hope for, but we can guess. We can even guess Jennifer’s story before she starts to reveal it — pretty enough for beauty pageants, pregnant at 15, courting others at Rider’s, the local biker bar, “trapped” in dying Asheboro.

You feel for her even before you realize she’s the most self-aware person we’ll meet in this world of Harleys, tattoos, unwed mothers and hardscrabble, low wage work.

J.D. Cranford’s story is written all over his face. Literally. When he gets off his Harley and cranks up his “Ever tell you about the time I was on ‘Divorce Court'” story we note that he has tattoos seemingly everywhere. By the movie’s end, he’s over 50 and his “everywhere” tattoo collection is complete as he takes on an old Native American hung-by-hooks-in-the-skin spirit quest ritual.

It’s the “pain” he’s addicted to, the machismo. “I did it, could you?” He’s so wasted most of the time we never learn the limits of his substance abuse, just the fact that he fathered another substance abuser with Sharon McNeill.

Sharon is a few years older, was “with” J.D. “just long enough to get pregnant” by him before he ran off and married “some girl down in Albemarle.” Sharon’s a regular at Clovers, trying to pick up pocket money to supplement a lifestyle that has her living with an older man “like we was married” who covers her expenses as he requires her housekeeping and care-giving.

She’s buried one ex, and is on contemptuous but half-decent terms with J.D., who hangs with their adult son at the campsite where that addict son lives.

Filmmakers Jacob Hatley and Tom Vickers can be commended for the intimacy of these portraits and for being able to go with the flow as their movie’s focus shifts and narrows thanks to Jennifer being “let go” from the jail job.

A story of “low-rent gamblers gambling finding a new way to lose at life” it is, then.

But the second half of the film is built around two events that hijack the narrative without really bringing it to a conclusion. There’s a long, excruciating “Election Night 2016” chapter with Sharon screeching about “that WOMAN” and the “very good businessman” she’s voted for, furious that the result will come down to “a buncha college boys decidin'” the outcome.

One-third-sober J.D. tries to explain “the electiorial college” to her, but we’ve all grasp how limited she is. We’ve seen the memes and memorized “You can’t fix stupid.” Sharon’s a MAGA poster child — not responsible for every idiotic thing she’s done and bitter about a country that doesn’t give the uneducated and gullible a leg up.

Showing alcoholic short-order-cook J.D. as the responsible one who sees the country-crumbling future that election foretold and sitting down with Jennifer as she struggles to “take stock” of her life as her illegal gambling room business turns out to be another bad decision is the movie’s way of removing “judgement” from the viewer’s mind and introducing pity.

Then you remember how 2024’s Hurricane Helene shattered a whole region just to the west of Asheboro’s lives, summoning up a vast relief effort that the yokels ignored, preferring to believe and vote for the low-intelligence lifelong grifter who convinced them “Democrats made it rain” and that “immigrants” were taking their relief money, and you go back to judging.

“You can’t fix stupid.”

If nothing else, Hatley and Vickers’ film holds a mirror up to people used to seeing what they want to believe about themselves — a righteous minority or majority (Math?), unlucky, downtrodden martyrs — and not as they really are. It’ll be a crying shame if even those from the dead-end corners of rural America who get around to watching “Clovers” and somehow miss the obvious.

Rating: unrated, disturbing self-injury images, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jennifer Paschal, J.D. Cranford and Sharon McNeill.

Credits: Directed by Jacob Hatley and Tom Vickers. A Slamdance Film Festival selection.

Running time: 1:35