Hirsch and McConaughey in Killer Joe.

Director William Friedkin has always been attracted to lurid movie material. From the gruesome, overcooked The Exorcist to the vile and unhinged Cruising, he craves plots about deeply conflicted characters who are hopelessly alienated, disconnected from both the society that surrounds them and even their own lives. One craves another well-crafted action nail-biter like his Oscar-winning The French Connection, but at 76, his view of the world just gets darker than ever. Small wonder, then, that he has found his literary soulmate in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, whose twisted, controversial and fascinating work has found its way to the screen through Mr. Friedkin’s jaundiced camera twice—first in the repellant schizophrenic thriller Bug, and now in the toxic trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe. When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as “the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino.” For shock value, cut to Gina Gershon, crawling across a filthy kitchen floor covered in blood to perform fellatio at gunpoint on a Colonel Sanders drumstick, and you have a high-water mark in tastelessness that gives depravity a bad name.

The inbred lowlifes in this B-movie black comedy are members of the Smith family, a clan of troglodytes in a seedy Texas trailer park replete with vicious barking dogs on chains, who swing into ruthless high gear from the very first scene, when penny-ante drug dealer Chris Smith (a game turn by Emile Hirsch, who has grown from the appealing, open-faced kid in The Emperor’s Club into a scabby, hirsute roughneck) arrives in a torrential rainstorm and is greeted at the screen door by his father’s new wife Sharla with a female full-frontal. Following a drug deal that went sour when his own mother stole the cocaine and kicked him out of her house, Chris is broke, desperate and not exactly lit by all four burners on the stove, on the lam from the good ole boys on motorcycles who want money or murder. But Chris has a plan: his mother’s $50,000 life insurance policy. If his mentally challenged, beer-swilling father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), who works as a grease monkey at Bob’s Muffler Shop, and his sluttish stepmom Sharla, a former stripper who works in a pizza parlor, will help, they can knock off Chris’s drunken mom (and Ansel’s ex-wife), pay off the debt, split the profits, and have enough dough left over to improve their lifestyle—maybe get out of the trailer and move up in the world, to a tract house with aluminum siding near a 7-Eleven.

To make sure the job goes off without a hitch, Chris has even hired a contract hitman who never fails—a psychotic cop in a Stetson hat and skin-tight jeans called Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who moonlights as an assassin. The first problem: they can’t pay his $25,000 fee until they collect the life insurance, so Killer Joe agrees to take Chris’s nubile, thumb-sucking, baby doll sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a retainer for his services. Chris and his dad are reluctant to pimp out their nubile Lolita for a killer’s bounty, but their survival instincts outweigh all feelings of morality and guilt. Besides, her daddy says, “It might just do her some good.” Second problem: What they don’t know is that Dottie’s mom (who is talked about but never seen) has made her the secret recipient of the insurance policy, and Dottie has her own ideas about what to do with the money. Nor does she completely mind the idea of losing her virginity to the swaggering, seductive and studly Joe and keeping the money herself. As the plot turns brutal, the psychopaths turn greedy—especially Ansel’s wife and partner-in-crime, Sharla (Ms. Gershon, shedding more than just her underwear and baring all)—lying, ruthlessly cheating each other and facing the ultimate consequences, in a curdled, rampaging splatterfest finale that sprays blood all over the walls and leaves almost the entire cast on the floor with their guts hanging out. Because the characters are all equally loathsome and stupid, you are never sure if the hilarity is intentional, but I guarantee you the antics of this dysfunctional chicken-fried family will make you gasp and laugh at the same time. Oddly enough, it’s the juxtaposition of comedy and horror that keeps Tracy Letts’ screenplay balanced between entertainment and nausea and highlights the highs and lows of Mr. Friedkin’s fast-paced, pulp fiction, film-noir direction. They can both thank the fearless cast for their passionate willingness to do anything—and everything—for maximum effect. Kicked and beaten by a man’s fists to human hamburger, Ms. Gershon is both amusing and appalling as she pushes the degradation of women beyond the boundaries of political correctness. Even Mr. McConaughey, a terrible actor with no craft or range who whistles through his teeth like a tea kettle until you climb the wall, seems more natural than usual, staggering around in his birthday suit, with his whining Texas accent used to good advantage. He even manages to give Killer Joe a mix of kink and tenderness, finding unexpected down-home joy in something as simple as a home-cooked tuna casserole. Ms. Temple’s thumb-sucking Dottie has erotic moments, but nothing Carroll Baker in a nightie didn’t think of first in Baby Doll. Mr. Friedkin imparts an ugly Texas landscape of convenience stores, pizza joints, auto repair shops and cheap motels to show the downfall of decaying blue-collar America with harrowing effect.

In the final analysis, the atmosphere overwhelms the logic. There is no subtext to the carnage; we hold out no hope that these clueless wretches will learn or grow or stretch beyond the depth of a mug of Lone Star draft. The narrative ideas come from better movies as varied as Double Indemnity, Tobacco Road and Fargo. I confess I found the uncompromising trashiness perversely riveting, until the ending, which pours on the gore like barbecue sauce. It sends you home reeling, but wondering what the point of it was, and why so many worthwhile people bothered to do it in the first place.

rreed@observer.com

KILLER JOES

Running Time 103 minutes

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by William Friedkin

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple

2/4

It's a beautifully constructed moment in director David Cromer's star-packed revival, which opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre Monday night: Artie is alone at the foot of the stage, his back to the audience as he looks upstage into flood lights, uninterested and unseen voices continuing their conversations despite his nebbishy pleas.

But just as it's a moment apart from the rest of the story--the only one not set in Shaughnessy's ratty and cluttered apartment in Sunnyside, Queens--it's also a moment apart from the rest of the production, perhaps the only understated and clarifying scene in an otherwise frenetic and scattered evening. (Scott Pask's set, a sliced-open diorama of that apartment, with the textured night sky looming overhead, is gorgeous.)

It's 1965, the day Pope Paul VI came to New York. Artie (Ben Stiller, nicely weak and subdued but always with an edge of stifled rage, not the defeated gentleness the script describes) is juggling plans to commit his wife, Bananas (Edie Falco, subtle and sensational), who has gone bananas, to a mental hospital on Long Island--the blue-leafed spread of the title--with pressure from his bossy mistress, Bunny (Jennifer Jason Leigh, energetic and something of a caricature), to marry her and move to California. His son, Ronnie (Christopher Abbott, vacant-eyed and intense), is at home, too, AWOL from Fort Dix and planning to murder the pontiff. They're all--except Bananas, in her own way the sanest of the bunch--desperate for fame and attention.

So are the trio of bossy nuns who show up in Act II; so is the Shaughnessys' hero, Billy Einhorn (a nicely slimy Thomas Sadoski), a neighborhood pal turned Hollywood director; so is Billy's ingénue girlfriend (Alison Pill, blond, beatific and bland), a spectral presence in white fur who's doesn't want anyone to know she's gone deaf. Everyone is hoping for a miracle, whether from Hollywood or the Vatican.

Reviewing a 1986 revival at Lincoln Center--which would go on to win four Tony Awards--Frank Rich wrote in The Times of his surprise in not finding Blue Leaves a "musty, archetypal artifact of late 1960's black comedy," saying that it had instead gained "weight and gravity." And I suppose that even three years after Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy and eight into the papacy of John Paul II, the idea that Americans worship attention the way they once worshiped gods, and the idea that the pope is just another pop-culture figure--"I'll be too big for any of you," Ronnie says as he finishes building his ecclesiastical explosive--could seem fresh and a touch surreal.

Yet in 2011, after Real Worlds and Real Housewives, after three decades of media-star pontiffs, Blue Leaves feels very much like an artifact of the late 1960s. At a time when some of its key surrealism is commonplace, Blue Leaves' other antic bits of wackiness--a fatal bombing played for laughs; hearing aids confused for pills--are still funny but land less effectively. The farcical elements don't build up the comedy of ridiculous premises; they instead rub awkwardly against the entirely reasonable.

But then, of course, this condemnation of celebrity culture feels a little incoherent on today's Broadway. So what? It'll sell tickets: It's got Ben Stiller! Edie Falco! Jennifer Jason Leigh!

Born Yesterday, which opened Sunday night at Cort Theatre, is also a revival, also--more so--a farce, and also playing on the strength of celebrity. In this case that celebrity belongs to Jim Belushi, the sitcom star, who plays Harry Brock, a New Jersey junkyard magnate who's come to Washington to get a bill passed with the help of a bought-and-paid-for senator.

Mr. Belushi is perfectly adequate in the part, a big man with a big voice happily browbeating everyone around him. (He'd be more convincing if his character's provenance had been relocated--it's tough to buy repeated assertions of a Garden State boyhood when they're delivered with Mr. Belushi's Chicago vowels.)

But the real star here is Nina Arianda. She's Billie Dawn, Brock's bottle-blond girlfriend, the role that made Judy Holliday's career, first in Garson Kanin's 1946 staging of his own play and then in the 1950 George Cukor movie. Ms. Arianda, in her Broadway debut, wowed audiences in last season's Off Broadway hit Venus in Fur; here, she makes Holliday's part her own, creating a happily stupid gangster's-moll type who, as tutored by a lazily crusading journalist (Robert Sean Leonard, who doesn't have much to do), learns that she likes to learn--and that her boyfriend Brock is corrupt.

Smoothly directed by Doug Hughes on a sumptuous hotel suite of a set by John Lee Beatty, Born Yesterday is a perfectly pleasant, perfectly pretty, perfectly tidy and perfectly forgettable three-acter. The one thing you won't forget is its Billie--who shows that there can be a lot lurking behind a vacant, pretty face.

Among the many fascinating things in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, directed by Ian Rickson, a fantastic new drama that opened late last week at the Music Box, is the problem of its main character.

As played by the amazing Mark Rylance--who gets to show off his tightly controlled buffoonery as this self-mythologizing but self-aware merry prankster--Johnny "Rooster" Byron is both a hero and a villain. He's a sort of charismatic noble savage, a Pied Piper who opens the clearing in front of his trailer in the woods of southwestern England to a motley assortment of outcasts and kids, who take refuge there to drink, drug, dance and debate. He's also a liar, a drug dealer and perhaps a pedophile. You root for him, mostly, but you're never convinced you shouldn't instead condemn him.

But that's the pleasure of Jerusalem, which follows a single day in Rooster's life, from the moment officials post an eviction notice on his trailer's door--the town council has had enough of him, especially as new subdevelopments have moved closer to his warren--till the next morning, when the eviction is set to begin. Everything in the play is always shifting: whether Rooster is lovable or horrible, whether his neighbors pity or admire him, whether he has the upper hand in his interactions or whether others do.

In that last bit, this very English play--it's filled with slang and references unfamiliar to Yankee ears, and the act curtain is painted with the Cross of St. George--is also very American. It wonders, is a man living by his own rules, on the edge of society, the most free among us, or the most trapped?

Sister Act, the 1992 movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, opened on Broadway a week ago as Sister Act, the 2011 musical produced by Whoopi Goldberg, and the cleverest thing that happened in the translation was resetting the story from 1990s San Francisco to late-1970s Philadelphia. This move gives the songwriters--the movie's greatest-hits soundtrack was jettisoned for new songs by Alan Menken, with lyrics by Glenn Slater--access to the Philadelphia Sound, that funky, horn-filled style of soul that emanated from the City of Brotherly Love in the middle part of the latter half of the last century. It's fun, smooth, ingratiating music for a fun, smooth, ingratiating show.

As you no doubt recall, Sister Act is about a nightclub singer who witnesses a murder and hides out in a convent, where the nuns end up teaching her how to be a better person while she teaches the nuns how to be better performers. It's perfect material for a musical: Well-executed choreography as salvation.

And so it has become an over-the-top, pull-out-the-stops, family-friendly Big Broadway Musical, with a large and competent cast, huge production numbers (all those dancing nuns!), glittery costumes (even the cops end up in sequins!), and an ever-changing series of towering sets (all those buttresses, flying in and out!).

As befits a production with a never-ending multiplicity of creators--the movie became a London musical became a New York musical, reworked by show-doctor director Jerry Zaks and rewritten by the comic playwright Douglas Carter Beane--it's also got a few too many plots (things flag considerably when the focus shifts from the singing nuns) and a few too many jokes (it's a funny line that "two bachelors who deal in antiques" want to buy the Gothic church building, but it's also a weird, out-of-place moment).

But if it's a bit overstuffed, a bit predictable, and maybe just the tiniest bit generic, it's most just a heavenly good time. And if you walk out of the Broadway Theatre humming "Dreamgirls"--which the anthem "Take Me to Heaven" that starts this show and ends its finale sounds a bit like--that's just another blessing.

editorial@observer.com