George (Alessandro Nivola) seems easy to read. Soft-spoken and handsome, he charms his wife, Chicago art gallery owner Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz). But when she asks, "Where did you come from?" his answer — "North Carolina" — is more complicated than it sounds.

Junebug begins six months into their marriage, as they're driving down to George's boyhood home. He hasn't been back for years; she has a professional mission, to sign local "outsider artist" David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor), who sees his primitivist paintings as expressions of visions direct from God. Depicting a violent local and national history (slave revolts) as well as clashes between generations, the paintings thrill Madeleine. "I love all the dog heads and computers and scrotums," she gushes.

George's mother, Peg (Celia Weston), immediately distrusts Madeleine, whom she reads as a manipulative "outsider." "I don't think anybody taught her how to do [right]," she tells her husband Eugene (Scott Wilson). "She's too pretty and too smart. That's a dangerous combination." Stoic and self-protective, Peg openly adores George, and shows patience with her younger son, Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie), who still lives at home. Studying for his GED and working at a kitchenware outlet, Johnny's married to his high school girlfriend, Ashley (Amy Adams), who's about to give birth to their first child.

Ashley admires the ultra-thin and British-born Madeleine ("You look so pretty," she gushes, "You smell good too, all baby-powdery and shampooey"), but not jealously. She wants more than anything for her own husband to be like he was in high school — happy, energetic and confident. Johnny, fearful and frustrated, feels no such openness. When Madeleine offers to help Johnny write a paper about Huckleberry Finn, she tries to explain slavery, racism and "freedom," leading Johnny first to erupt in defensive anger ("None of us need shit from you"), and then to think she's trying to seduce him.

Upset that she's been misunderstood, Madeleine is also seeing her husband anew, the tensions that make him passionate, sensitive and puzzling. As she watches him sing a hymn at a church supper, her face reflects new appreciation and surprise at his beauty. And so Madeleine — in part playing audience surrogate — also begins to see herself.

Junebug is brilliantly attentive to such details of self-discovery. With quiet images that sometimes seem almost painterly — scenes lasting only seconds, focused on empty spaces or exposed faces — the film reveals inner lives without collapsing into overwrought climaxes. Seemingly simple, these delicate, acute compositions hint at the difficulties of reading, pressing you to look more carefully.

Junebug Directed by Phil Morrison A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended