The hero is a widowed veteran, father of a tiny girl who is taken away from him when he is unjustly imprisoned.

The warden of the camp where he’s jailed seems like a reasonable sort. He recognizes a man who is good with his hands who can solve problems menial or mechanical on the fly.

You want to shorten your sentence? Help me out with this onerous task, just a bit of backpacking across the mountains.

That’s the plot of “The Weight,” a lean, crackling thriller in the “Wages of Fear” (“Sorceror” was a remake of that.), “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Deliverance” mold.

It’s a genre picture that follows formula and still keeps you guessing, another acting feather in Ethan Hawke’s hat and a reminder that Russell Crowe still does good very work — nuanced, shaded and dangerous.

Hawke reteams with his “The Good Lord Bird” TV series producer Padraic McKinley, who directs this murky, foggy saga in simple, mythic strokes, hitting each action beat hard, steadily raising the stakes every step of the way.

The Great Depression is on and police everywhere are making matters worse, hunting “vagrants” in the interest of the propertied people who always call the shots.

That’s how our downtrodden Everyman, Murphy (Hawke) is grabbed. He may be good with engines, construction and everything menial in between. But when you can’t find work in 1933, you get evicted. When the a crowd of out-of-uniform cops hassle him and get handsy with his little girl Penny (Avy Berry), he fights back and that’s how he ends up in jail.

Months later, facing the permanent loss of wee Penny, he’s transferred to a road work camp run by Clancy (Crowe). The Boss comes off as tough but fair minded. None of your Southern fried sadism in this forested corner of Oregon. When he picks up on Murphy’s plight, and his special skills, he makes his offer.

There’s this gold mine where they do their own smelting into ingots (apparently). With Franklin Roosevelt in the White House trying to turn the economy around, that isn’t going to be worth much to your average fat cat unless they rush it out and hide it or “speculate” their way to riches.

Murphy can hand-pick three feloow inmates — mouthy Rankin (Austin Amelio), leftist intellectual Singh (Avi Nash) and the stoic Olsen (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) — and if they can retrieve that gold, under guard (Sam Hazeldine and George Burgess) and haul it over the mountains, they’ll earn early release.

The first thing that doesn’t go according to plan is the Native American cook (Julia Jones) who flees the mining camp with them. It won’t be the last.

The narrative, scripted by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, takes these seven characters to the inevitable rotting rope bridge spanning a canyon, a structure that won’t support their weight and the weight of the gold.

They’ll be hunted by greedy prospectors, dogged by each man and woman’s human failings and bedeviled by the fear that this is all a set-up by mine company hustler Taggert (Alec Newman) and/or Clancy.

I love the world the film immerses us in right from the start — Murphy driving an ancient Ford like a banshee down back roads just to entertain his pre-child-seat daughter giggling in the back, a kind neighbor trying to find things she can pay Murphy for to help them survive, a “justice” system that’s nothing of the sort.

Politics come to the fore on the march, as the anti-capitalist Singh is badgered by chatterbox orphan turned criminal Rankin, only to have the mouthy dope schooled by “the wrong kind’a Indian.”

Every character may be a stock “type,” but every characterization is spot-on, especially in the ways those “types” surprise us.

The score tosses in a few bits of modern (“classic” rock) music that jars. I guess banjos are out of the question in this Depression Era “Deliverence.”

Some of the problem solving, woodlore and martial skills Murphy displays is convincing. Some of it invites us to second-guess him and common sense.

And the movie does that, too.

How will this play out when the whip comes down? We’re guessing right up to the end about how satisfying (crowd pleasing) or frustrating the finale will be. Lay some of that at the feet of Hawke, who isn’t shy about signing on to movies where right or good triumphs doesn’t triumph over evil or The System.

As the screen faded to black, several of us got up to leave the showing I attended. But to a one, we all turned and stared back at the screen from the hallway, just to make damned sure Hawke, Crowe, director McKinley & Co. weren’t serviing up one last surprise to send us home with.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio, Avi Nash,
Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen, Sam Hazeldine, Avy Berry, Alec Newman, George Burgess and Russell Crowe.

Credits: Directed by Padraic McKinley, scripted by Matthew Booi, Shelby Gaines, Leo Scherman. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:55