The story unfolds against the unique backdrop of the Texas Panhandle, an arid section of the state that is larger than all of the other states around it. The screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), grew up on a ranch in central Texas in a family filled with lawmen, and it shows in his writing. The film has an innate feel for the rhythms and eccentricities of tiny towns cut through by two-lane highways, where life is slow, old-timers linger at the local diner for hours on end, and anyone from out of town is immediately recognized as such.

Toby and Tanner have a specific plan to hit small banks early in the morning before there are any customers, taking only small bills from the cash drawer so as not to waste time and risk a paint bomb being planted in their haul. They drive stolen cars, burying each one at the family ranch after the getaway, and when they get enough cash they head to a casino in Oklahoma to launder it through poker chips. Toby is insistent that the robberies be as methodical and nonviolent as possible, although Tanner can’t always help himself, and his spur-of-the-moment decision to hit a bank unplanned begins the unraveling of their plan.

Pursuing them is Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), a grizzled old Texas Ranger just days away from retirement, and his reluctant partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham), a half-Indian, half-Mexican who must endure Marcus’s constant ethnic ribbing. Like Toby and Tanner, they are diametric opposites who nevertheless need each other, and the rapport between them starts off as comic relief (with Alberto playing the weary straight man to Marcus’s bushy-mustachioed provocateur) but steadily grows into something deeper and more meaningful—a real partnership. Unlike Sicario, which at least partially centered on a female protagonist, Hell or High Water takes place almost exclusively in a world of men, which the film suggests is a world on the brink of extinction. Marcus is the aging relic of a previous era whose retirement will open his desk chair to a female Ranger, while all of film’s tiny towns are associated primarily with the old men who still live there. The female faces that do appear—Katy Mixon as a waitress who clearly wants Toby to steal her, Dale Dickey as a sharp-tongued bank teller (“You boys are new at this” she tartly tells Toby and Tanner when they try to rob her bank before the manager arrives with the keys to the cash drawers)—all seem like they’d rather be someplace else. The Western frontier, once the promise of the nation, is closed.

The English-born director, David Mackenzie, has made a few splashes on the film festival circuit with attention grabbers like the sexually charged thriller Young Adam (2003) and the brutal prison drama Starred Up (2013), and he brings a measured eye and a cunning mix of humor and pathos to the material. He isn’t afraid to shift tones rapidly (the first robbery starts almost comically with the brothers’ ineptitude and ends with a shock cut away from an unnecessary punch to someone’s face), but the majority of the film unfolds in a smooth, deliberate manner that reflects the flow of life along the backroads of the Panhandle, albeit with a few detours into amusing caricature (the most memorable being an old waitress at a tiny steakhouse who berates a New Yorker who decades ago had the temerity to order something other than a T-bone).

The characters are each indelible in his own way, and the actors own the roles. Bridges does a variation on his Rooster Cogburn from the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010), albeit without the surly drunkenness, and it works marvelously. Chris Pine, best known right now as Captain James T. Kirk from the rebooted Star Trek franchise, is duly impressive playing a desperate man trying to hold things together, while Ben Foster plays crazy with enough humanity to make his character’s clear path toward self-destruction tragic, rather than cathartic. The violence in Hell or High Water hurts because the film has texture and meaning and the characters matter. “I would love nothing more than to be considered an actor’s writer,” Sheridan said in a 2015 interview with Deadline, and based on the strength of Sicario, which was the best film I saw last year, and this one, he is succeeding admirably.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Lionsgate