Justin Kurzel directs an expert true-crime thriller about a real-life American white supremacist movement called the Order that murdered Jewish radio journalist Alan Berg and carried out bank robberies in the 1980s to finance a planned national uprising. Their leader, Bob Mathews, sought a gruesome martyrdom that included an Alamo-style standoff with federal agents at the group’s remote farmhouse in Washington state. Screenwriter Zach Baylin (Oscar-nominated for King Richard) adapts the book about the case, The Silent Brotherhood, by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt; Nicholas Hoult plays the baby-faced Mathews, with Jude Law and Tye Sheridan as the (fictional) officers fighting to take him down.

Kurzel creates a solid, vehement film, with Law and Hoult proving to be an interesting cast; There are well-shot action sequences and dramatic beats about white power fanatics pursuing their cruel dream, while the sweaty, hapless good guys obsess over their jobs and neglect their families. But this isn’t Kurzel’s best work; It feels more like something for streaming television than for the big screen, and is pretty two-dimensional and straightforward compared to Nitram or True History of the Kelly Gang. I wondered how Michael Mann might have played the shootings and how Jeremy Saulnier (who serves as producer here) might have penetrated more subversively into the granite skulls of the neo-Nazis.

Law’s Terry Husk – that last name is perhaps another annoying note – is a federal agent, hollowed out by the job, worn out and brutalized by dealing with gangsters in New York City; Estranged from his wife and daughters, he is now relocated to Idaho, where he senses a strange pattern in recent robberies. Sheridan plays a bright young local police officer named Jamie Bowen, whom Husk turns to for help and who, under Husk’s macho influence, begins to separate from his young family. Hoult plays the obnoxious Mathews; He definitely conveys the unsettling gentleness of Mathews, although he could have expressed the actual evil and violence a little more strongly. Mathews himself is someone who neglects his (faithful) wife, and the parallel suggested is a bit superficial.

What brings the film most to life are moments that come straight from life: the nosebleed Husk gets while interrogating a suspect in the cells, or the way he gets blood from his hands after a street shootout , carefully wiping them in the dust. The fight against fascism is now more than ever a serious matter, and it’s right that Kurzel takes it seriously, but that means his film feels tonally limited and the finale is strangely drawn out and even disappointing. But “The Order” maintains the tension until the end.