I am a sucker for a simple story on film, if it is well-written, well-acted and has an appropriate soundtrack. I believe Christian Bale is the best actor of our time. In Out of The Furnace he is given a starkly peopled plot in which to prove it. This movie is about the ‘America you don’t see’, as a friend who leant it to me commented. I expect the movie to be overlooked, in part because of what is essentially the gratuitous inclusion of bare-knuckle MMA in the story line, surely done to infuse some interest in this film about a slice of America that almost no one cares about.

Out of The Furnace is set in the extreme eastern foothills of Appalachia, on the Pennsylvania New Jersey border. It is a story of brotherhood. Russell Baze [Bale], a convicted drunk driver finishing a term for vehicular manslaughter, attempts to mentor his brother Rodney [Casey Affleck]. The story thread involving the prize-fighting is pure recycled 1950s Hollywood bullshit. The fights themselves are not badly done. If not for the inclusion of the prize-fighting I’d rank this movie up there with The Deer Hunter or Deliverance.

Throughout the movie there is a sense of doom that pervades these brother’s attempts to make something of their dismal lives. It is clear though, that they live in a dead-end world, and that Rodney, an emotionally scarred Iraqi war veteran, will not find the light. This fatalistic story is shadowed darkly by a soundtrack that really worked on me despite my lack of musical appreciation.

Forest Whitaker, Sam Shepard, Willem Defoe, and Zoe Saldano provide an excellent supporting cast. However, the movie’s dark atmosphere was clinched by Woody Harrelson’s intensely believable performance as an irredeemable leader of a white-trash drug gang. There was a scene when father and son go searching for the missing younger son in a pickup, across the rolling green hills to a lonely frame house, where nothing good awaits. I have lived that scene, outside of a small Appalachian town, in search of a man who, when we found him, had only an untrimmed leg of deer in the freezer and a shaker of salt on the table, to feed his barefoot wife and children.

Scott Cooper nailed that scene, as he did many others, and Christian Bale plied his craft with the virtuosity he always does.