Boasting grimy imagery, a primal, tightly-written script, and a breakout performance by a promising young newcomer, Kat Candler’s Hellion–an expansion of her 2012 short that tore up the festival circuit–is the best juvenile delinquent film since last year’s indie darling, Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12. It captures the madness the boredom of a small, nowheresville town can elicit in restless teens and examines the inextricable link shared by a family in mourning.

In a standout performance, first-timer Josh Wiggins (discovered by Candler on Youtube) plays Jacob, a 13-year-old troublemaker who lives in the Southeast Texas town of Port Arthur with his younger brother, Wes (Deke Garner), and their alcoholic, widower dad, Hollis (Aaron Paul). When we meet the family, it’s quickly apparent that they haven’t shaken the effects of their mother’s passing. Hollis is trying his hardest to stop drinking away his problems, and Jacob wastes his time smashing trucks with baseball bats, setting things on fire, and doing other stuff troubled teens in indie movies do.

Little Wes is less troubled than his dad and brother, but Jacob insists on dragging him along on his daily knucklehead hijinks, acting as a poisonous influence while, more importantly, putting Wes in danger. Eventually, Child Protection Services catch wind of the unhealthy environment Hollis and Jacob have created for Wes and transfer him into the care of his aunt, Pam (Juliette Lewis). With Wes out of the house and Pam threatening to move far away, separating the family forever, Hollis spirals down into the bottoms of bottles and Jacob becomes more reckless and frustrated than ever.

The absence of Jacob’s mom is the movie’s foundation, driving the story even in its quietest moments: when Hollis scolds Jacob in his pickup truck, ordering him to “take responsibility”; when Jacob stares at Hollis with a defiant snarl because he doesn’t want to eat his sandwich. Through all the tension, we know they’d connect if only they could admit to each other what’s really eating them up on the inside.

“I miss her.”

“I miss her, too.”

Candler sets the dusty, muggy town of Port Arthur to a furious metal soundtrack including the likes of Metallica and Slayer. It’s an unusual mix, but one that turns out to be a match made in heaven. Watching Jacob tear across a motocross course on his dirt bike (his only productive hobby) while crunchy guitars blast on the speakers is a thrill, and the obligatory lens flare from the sun gives everything a nostalgic glow that’ll have you missing the days when you could just go outside with your friends and roll around in the muck for fun. All in all, Candler and her team’s presentation is top-notch and stirringly atmospheric.

Wiggins is a superstar in his debut, capturing the volcanic nature of teens harboring too much energy for their undeveloped bodies to contain. He makes good decisions and reacts well to what he’s given his more experienced adult counterparts. Paul played a young punk himself in the role of his career in Breaking Bad, and he slips into the role of flawed father figure nicely here. Lewis is pleasingly cast against-type, playing perhaps her most chemically balanced character ever with honesty and naturalism. She’s a wonderful surprise and overachieves in a role that could have been one-note.

The way the film wraps up feels a bit odd, with a home invasion sequence feeling tonally dissonant. Lewis thankfully saves the otherwise overblown scene with a wonderfully grounded reaction, and Wiggins follows suit. While the ending could have been a knockout had it gone in a gutsier, off-the-beaten-path direction, it still manages to emphasize the film’s poignant message: A broken family is still a family.

Hellion trailer

In Jim Mickle’s chameleonic noir thriller Cold in July, an adaptation of the cult novel by Joe R. Lansdale, Michael C. Hall takes perhaps the most drastic departure in his career, playing Richard Dane, a timid, unremarkable picture frame store owner who accidentally shoots a burglar in his small-town Texas home in the film’s wonderfully edited, punchy opening. The gutless Richard, shaken by the consequences of his twitchy trigger finger, is soon plunged head-first into a world of old-school cowboy badasses and gunfights when Russel, (a gruff Sam Shepard) the father of the slain home invader, seeks revenge on Richard and his family. The strength of Mickle’s film is that, once you feel like you know exactly where it’s going, it takes an unexpected turn and becomes almost a new kind of film entirely. The film’s weakness is that the varied forms it inhabits feel largely derivative, not elevated enough to free themselves from the norm.

At first, Richard and his wife (Vinessa Shaw) and son are terrorized by Russel, with the creepy ex-con picking up where his son left off, invading the Dane home, more as an act of intimidation than stealing. Mickle is gifted at squeezing every bit of intensity and terror out of classic stalker scenes, and these early sequences are truly gripping. He relishes in playing with genre conventions, mining the work of Romero most notably, though less so than his Zombie thriller, Stake Land. Pulpy ’70s flicks inform Cold in July‘s style throughout, with grisly flashes of violence punctuating Mickle’s methodical approach to action. (An exception is the film’s climax, a nighttime shootout that falls apart quickly and finishes of the film with an ugly thud.)

Hall, wearing a gloriously ’80s mullet, is fantastic as Richard, a meek man forced to become a tough-guy overnight. Helping him along on his road to becoming a true badass is Don Johnson, playing a karate-kicking private eye who gives the film a welcome dose of bravado. The relationship between Richard and Russel goes to unexpected places I won’t spoil here, but I will say that Hall and Shepard have a quiet chemistry that stretches them both as actors. Shaw, however, is regrettably invisible, adding little to the emotional core of the story, despite her character’s positioning in the plot being ripe for powerful scenes of heartache and fear. Those scenes never come.

Richard’s arc is fascinating on paper; he’s faced with the responsibility of being an alpha male for the sake of protecting his family. In that gunshot flash that opens the movie, he sends himself down a path he’d never had the desire to go down, and yet, he must man up or perish. What sullies the emotional impact of his story are the later acts, whose blood-splattering violence is so arresting and dizzying you forget the subtle details of what brought our hero there in the first place. Everything devolves into midnight movie craziness, and while it doesn’t erase how involving the first two thirds of the film are, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. There’s a powerful theme of fatherly duty swimming around in the buckets of blood, but it in the end it all but drowns.

Cold in July trailer