Movie Nation

It’s not the cars and the clothes that establish “The Order” as a period piece. It’s the notion of Federal law enforcement aggressively pursuing violent traitors out to overthrow democracy no matter how indifferent the entitled, selective-enforcement rural sheriffs and deputies of Red State America chose to behave.

How quaint.

Looking at America today, it’s no wonder it took an Australian to film this. Looking at the subject matter, it’s no wonder that tiny distributor Vertical was the only studio with the guts to release it.

Jude Law stars in this account of the hunt for the murderous, bank-robbing, bomb-planting white nationalist group that took the infamous “Turner Diaries” fascist fan fiction as its manifesto for overthrowing the will of the people.

“The Order” was a splinter group, not the only one, among the reactionary “redoubt” building extremists who have flocked to the remote corners of the American northwest seeking to start their own twisted “Christian” “Aryan Nations” in recent decades.

You can’t spit without hitting some version of a group like this in the big, empty spaces of Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon and the Dakotas. I lived in that part of the country when the events depicted here took place. The crackpots and violent fringe dwellers already had a home there.

Law plays Terry Husk, a composite character FBI agent newly-assigned to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in the early ’80s. He’s a loner, split from his family, a former Marine who worked to bring down the Mafia, disrupt the racist terrorism of the KKK and other dangers to democracy. He shows up in Idaho just as Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) is leading his “Silent Brotherhood” of terrorists on a robbing, bombing and murdering spree.

Tye Sheridan is the sheriff’s deputy who reveals himself to be more interested in helping the FBI than his boss, the look-the-other-way sheriff. But even he is alarmed by Husk’s bulldozing of suspects.

“You know, not everybody around here was born under a white sheet.”

Nope. But a lot of cross-burners move there for a reason.

Husk doesn’t see bank robbing as something far right extremists do, no matter what Deputy Jamie says. But a visit to the swastiska-loving founder of the Aryan Nations, Richard Butler (played by Victor Slezak at his most sinister) convinces him.

Butler’s “strays” are going even more extreme.

Mathews’ cult of disaffected, violent men and compliant women has its own compound — complete with cash counterfeiting, “militia” training and bomb building operations. They operate like any other gang, executing members who talk too much.

There are banks and armored cars to rob, bombs to plant as part of those operations. And there’s this mouthy “Jew” on the radio, Alan Berg (Marc Maron, spot-on) who spends too much air time baiting and humiliating anti-Semites like them, people Berg figures he might be able to “reach,” and if they’re unreachable, that he can ridicule them into oblivion. Mathews gives the order that this “Talk Radio” host be silenced.

Director Justin Kurzel (“Nitram,”“The True History of the Kelly Gang” and “Assassin’s Creed”) working from Zach Baylin’s script based on the 1989 book account of this FBI hunt “The Silent Brotherhood,” keeps the focus on the ordinary thugs who settle in these empty places of extraordinary beauty with the idea of starting a revolution there, one where this time they get to be society’s winners.

Hoult doesn’t make the most charismatic and smart cult leader, but by and large, these characters aren’t rocket scientists with a gift for rhetoric.

Law and Sheridan play “types” — the obsessed veteran law enforcement officer, the “kid” who will have to learn by being tossed into the deep end. But they’re spot-on, here, with each a bit over-the-top at times.

Jurnee Smollett is superb as the jaded F.B.I. agent who knows Husk, knows his flaws and tries to temper his cowboy tendences.

George Tchortov, Sebastian Pigott, Daniel Doheny and Matias Lucas among others impress upon us “the banality of evil” in the sorts of goons who join a cult.

Slezak, of TV’s “Hell on Wheels,” “Treme” and “Blue Bloods,” simmers with menace in just a handful of scenes. His presence is so calculating and overpowering that we figure any scene depicting a neo-Nazi gathering where Richard Butler allows pipsqueak Bob Mathews to take over his speech has to be fiction.

And comic and actor turned podcaster Maron dazzles as Berg, a character immortalized (and fictionalized in Eric Bogosian and Oliver Stone’s “Talk Radio,” an older talk show host who brought wit and a sad fear for the future of America to his shows about and including calls from right wing hate groups.

The robberies and shootouts are staged to brilliant effect. And even the over-the-top acting moments can be forgiven by the “period piece” nature of the history being told.

Back then, we had fewer questions about the “loyalties” and motives of the FBI. Back then, even conservative attorney generals and FBI chiefs were patriotic enough to recognize real threats to democracy, and landed on them with the full weight and fury that The People empower them to use to protect and preserve the peace, and the country.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Marc Maron, Victor Slezak and Jurnee Smollett

Credits: Directed by Justin Kurzel, scripted by Zach Baylin, based on the book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. A Vertical release.

Running: 1:54