Director Roberto Minervini takes us deep into the harsh, lush backwoods of Louisiana to meet its denizens in their most ordinary and their most intimate moments. Mark gets down on his knees in a pond, tenderly pleading for his girlfriend Lisa to be his bitch for life. Later, his sister wraps a comforter around him as he stands, frozen and heroin-fried, outside of her house. Jim pumps up his gun-toting militia trainees with a devastating critique of U.S. intervention in the Middle East and spray paints anti-Obama obscenities on a car husk before killing it off with machine-gun fire. There is so much ugly on display here — addiction, bigotry, zealotry — but it never overwhelms the deep (though sometimes deeply twisted) love of family, of nature and of country. (AV)