White Lightnin'

Jesco White is a real person. He's an Appalachian mountain dancer, an art that's somewhere between tap and speaking in tongues, a sort of interpretative folk remnant. He's been examined in a handful of documentaries, including one coming later this year directed by Jackass frontman Johnny Knoxville. His father, D. Ray White, was also a mountain dancer, immortalised in a Hank Williams III song. Jesco has been sampled in a variety of songs, quoted in others, by artists as varied as Mastodon and Beck. His father was hillbilly royalty, but Jesco's tale as presented here is less Shakespearean than biblical.

Young Jesco is played by Owen Campbell. He's a hellion, a wastrel, a glue and petrol huffing wreck. His youth is spent in (and only briefly out) of institutions. With a sparse electric guitar soundtrack scrawling over the top this is frenetic, visceral. Campbell's performance recalls Thomas Turgoose in This Is England, and not just because of the shaven head. There's a sullen intensity, a spark ground under, a fire damped but waiting to explode, and explode it does, all too regularly, starting another round of confinement.

The jump to Jesco as a man is smooth, the episodes separated by a fugue-like interlude, a stentorian preacher over time-lapsed clouds, a woodland valley lit by remote skies. When Jesco leaves the mental institution his mother asks the doctor to explain what's wrong with him in simpler terms, "on account of how [she] don't got the education". He tells her to hold her hand up to his head, that his mind is "like ashes". "Like from a cigarette?" she asks. The elder Jesco is Edward Hogg, and he is tremendous. When he cocks his head he is as a child, bright-eyed, or a demon with a fiery gaze. He is mercurial, bringing to mind the tremendous plasticity of Michael Sheen, though in fairness his absorption into the role is in part aided by his relative obscurity.

We see him starting out towards a career as a mountain dancer, literally in his father's footsteps, and in a dead man's shoes. Haunted by the murder of D.Ray he tours the South doing his fancy stepping, and then he meets the love of his life. She's played by Carrie Fisher, and she's, well, brilliant. From cooking her man his "sloppy slimy eggs" to a heart-breaking performance of Honky-Tonk Angels, it's hard to find where she could get more into the role. She disappears into it, almost unrecognisable. Yet despite her role in his life, there's a darkness, and when it emerges...

Director Dominic Murphy is a newcomer to the silver screen, as is writer Shane Smith, but his co-writer Eddy Moretti is best known for Heavy Metal In Baghdad. There's a real alt-rock sensibility here, a sort of new-wave early Nineties dance music thing, the preaching time lapses in particular recall a raft of music videos. While the soundtrack features Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the font used appears to be from Hill Street Blues, the initial reference point might well be The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. It's as hypnotic, as driving, as dream-like.

Jesco is an unreliable narrator. Beyond his blackouts, his frequent institutionalisation, he's a wretch, his brain is ashes. As the film moves to its close we cannot tell what is real, what is imagined, what is misinterpreted. It doesn't matter. This is a story, a fable based in truth. a hallucinatory allegory, a toe-tapping mythographic freakout. It's rooted in fact, indeed, its initial spark is thinly fictionalised biopic, but as it grows, branches, its leaves are a sort of berserk soft shoe shuffle, its fruit dark and satisfying.