Like Kit Carruthers in Badlands, Harlan finds solace in a girl too young for him. He meets Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) on her way to the beach with her high school friends; he's wearing cowboy gear and pumping gas, and all too glad to leave his job behind when she invites him to come along. "Are you for real?" asks Tobe's friend. "I think so," he flirts. "Wanna give a squeeze?"

While Harlan appears guileless, he's also strange, simultaneously out of place and looking to fit in. Seeking, as he puts it, "one open face" to reflect his own, Harlan is utterly different from Tobe's gruff corrections officer father Wade (David Morse) and captivates her brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin) as well. Where Wade insists the motherless boy needs to grow up, the wannabe cowboy identifies with him, inviting him along for burgers and target shooting.

The inevitable revelation of Harlan's darkness doesn't so much prove Wade's rightness as it chips away at the mythic heroism Tobe and Lonnie want to believe. Tobe suspects—despite Harlan's outraged protests to the contrary—that he has stolen a horse from a rough-hewn rancher (Bruce Dern). Suddenly, their shimmery afternoon of riding over hilltops looks spooky. Is Harlan as unhinged as he seems to be or does everyone else just not get him?

The film gives up trying to be ambiguous about Harlan when it shows him alone. His letters sound as much like Travis Bickle's greeting card as Holly's narration in Badlands, at once juvenile and ominous. He poses with his gun in jump cuts before his mirror (so Taxi Driver), playing a volatile, virile Western hero. Harlan's voiceover lies about what he's been doing: "I am going with a super gal. She brought me to her family and they have made me their own. And we are stuck together like each other's shadow."

Harlan's multiplying fictions collide when he winds up, inevitably, on the run, just like in a movie. With Lonnie along, he wanders through the night, ending up, miraculously, in a place where a handsome marshal is shyly asking a beautiful woman to dance. Beguiled, Harlan doesn't notice the cameras or boom microphones set off on a side street. Even when authorities enter the scene to take Harlan down, it only expands his fantasy: He's too ready for a showdown.

Until the movie turns in on itself, piling up metaphor on metaphor, it offers a sharp revision of rugged individualist myths. But near its end, Down in the Valley turns less shadowy and more trite, less a study of cultural context than personal pathology. And then it's no longer defiant or deconstructive, just familiar.

Down in the Valley

Directed by David Jacobson A ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Ritz Five