There's something clichéd and stereotypical running through Chrystal: a man comes home from prison to find that the more things change, the more things stay the same; a woman waits for her man to come home from prison, wondering if he will be the same person he was before and hoping he is not; this couple is united by a tragic life together and by nearly twenty years of suffering apart. You've seen this drama before, just as you've seen the milieu of poor white trash trailers, rowdy redneck bars, and crazed meth fiends. Most of them probably starred Billy Bob Thornton, as this one does. But Chrystal (Ray McKinnon, 2004) does something magical - it takes these clichés, stereotypes, and conventional settings and invests them with such intensity of faith and pressure of feeling that the result is an absolute jewel.

For one thing, these characters are not pathetic, ignorant shells waiting for our derision. They know who they are, what they are, and though their lives are not conventional or desirable, they are not the lives of victims. If Chrystal (Lisa Blount) seems slow, it is the product of neither ignorance or retardation, but the overwhelming weight of sixteen years of grief, loneliness, and thought. Her mother (Grace Zabriski) blames Chrystal's bleak outlook on too much reading. Confusing Tennessee Williams with Truman Capote, she describes how, seeing him on Johnny Carson one night, frustration compelled her to "yell at that drunk little fairy, 'You ruined my daughter's life!'" It is a masterful acting moment, genuinely funny even as her disappointment and heartbreak burn through the laughter.

The film is filled with such character-defining, self-aware moments. In another superficially typical but actually inspired scene, the psychic Ms Mabel (Kathryn Howell), Chrystal's most trusted advisor, offhandedly mentions how "the fundamentalists are running me out of business, saying this is the devil's house. If the devil showed up here, I'd do what anybody else would do. I'd run." Elsewhere Snake (director McKinnon), the meth-addled, out-of-control drug dealer who pursues Thornton, regards a welded sculpture in Thornton's yard and exclaims "I get it, white trash folk art! It's great!" Each character in the film recognizes that they are playing a role, from the psychic to the dropout kids who hang around Snake trying to find a way into adulthood. But they, and the actors themselves, play their roles all the way.

The plot is simple: Thornton, a former marijuana grower and alcoholic, has served nearly twenty years in prison, taking the fall for his cousin Larry (Walt Goggins). As Larry explains, the sentence should not have been so long, if not for "a couple of escape attempts, and that baby didn't help things either." Thornton carries the guilt of having accidentally killed his baby son in a police chase, and injuring Chrystal so that she can no longer have children. While he has been gone, he has turned into a sort of folk story, equal parts legend and warning, though the reality of his exploits (an escape attempt that ends 50 feet into an air duct when Thornton gets hungry) only disappoint Larry. Now that Thornton is back, Larry wants to get back into business, but business now means dealing with Snake, a wiry, weaselly hillbilly who gets high on his own supply and seems on the verge of collapse. Snake's instability only encourages Larry: "Somebody's got to be there to pick up the pieces."

Thornton, though, wants only a quiet life with Chrystal, forgiveness, redemption - all the usual desires for such a movie. His past will not leave him alone, however; he pulls out a twenty-year old pot stash to make a little money, and ends up running afoul of Snake, who challenges him to a fight outside a barbecue speakeasy (a place with the best pork and the most violent patrons in the state). In a virtuoso sequence, Thornton first toys with Snake, slapping him, kicking his shins, and generally humiliating his outclassed and bombed opponent. Then, something in Thornton dies out, and he gives up fighting, allowing Snake to pound him brutally without resistance. As we see throughout the film, it is a scene that begins humorously and ends somberly, even transcendently. Thornton's character subjects himself over and over to acts of self-mortification, seeking salvation from his guilt and suffering through more suffering until his ultimate self-sacrifice.

The only reason Chrystal works is the nearly magic-realist surreality deeply embedded in McKinnon's imagery and overall aesthetic. There are moments when we wonder if what we are seeing is real, imaginary, or hallucinatory. Sometimes, as when Thornton saves Chrystal from Snake without ever being seen, we may be experiencing all three at the same time. McKinnon builds this unique tone with a host of techniques, including the haunting old-time music that dominates the soundtrack, the slow camera moves and almost accidentally perfect compositions, and the most distant, ghostly performances this side of Herzog's Heart of Glass (1976). But this combination of factors makes it possible for Thornton's weird, mad grab at redemption at the end to move us to anything but complete confusion. When Thornton returns with a baby after a year hiding in the woods, covered in a sheet of plastic and looking for all the world like a bearded, soaked Madonna, somehow we have been prepared for it. Somehow, his end seems inevitable in the most comforting way. It may not be redemption - his self-mortification seems to have driven him not to salvation, but madness - but it is strangely heroic. His end frees Chrystal, who has been waiting in an unbaptized limbo for him, to begin her own life. And Chrystal's is a life prime to burst with beauty.

The comparison to Herzog is apt. In his bizarre, infinitely entertaining DVD commentaries, Herzog obsessively stresses our era's hunger for emotionally and intellectually resonant images. McKinnon supplies such images in spades, not the least being the final composition, in which we finally see Thornton's sculpture in full. A little girl pedals a tricycle suspended nearly two stories above the ground, seeming to fly, seeming to have freed herself from gravity with nothing but her innocent exuberance. Her very joy at being a living creature lifts her out of the grime around her, and a rusty iron scaffold becomes a heavenly vehicle. I would never let my own kid play on that thing, but as an image in an image-starved culture, it's positively sublime.