Scoot McNairy and Kit Harington in Sleek Noir – The Hollywood Reporter

Director Rod Blackhurst’s stark crime flick Blood for Dust is nothing new under the sun — or, more accurately, the frigid sun of Wyoming and Montana, where the story takes place. But with an array of burnished, lived-in performances from a strong cast and an underlying level of suspense punctuated by a few gnarly action scenes, it’s certainly a watchable little genre venture that could find an audience, especially on streaming.

Fargo (both the movie and the TV series) immediately comes to mind in this early 90s-set thriller that feels very much like a product of the early 90s, with lots of caustic dialogue and outbursts of gory violence against a backdrop of Western American desolation. Following a forlorn salesman, Cliff (Scoot McNairy), who gets roped into illegal drug trafficking by his badass former colleague, Ricky (Kit Harington), it heads to mostly familiar places, but manages to do so in a way that makes us want to stick around for the ride.

A bleak opening has a guy blowing his brains out in his tiny corporate office, where he was supposed to meet with Cliff and Ricky after hours. We flash-forward to a year and half later, with Cliff now peddling defibrillators to mid-sized businesses around the West, striving and mostly failing to make ends meet. As indicated in any good modern film noir guidebook, he eventually winds up alone at a strip club, where he crosses paths with Ricky, who invites him into a smuggling ring led by a nasty local kingpin (an unleashed Josh Lucas).

You don’t have to be a fan of Fargo or Blood Simple or even A Simple Plan to figure out that things will not go smoothly for Cliff, who’s tasked with driving a station wagon filled with either coke or heroin up Montana’s I-90 highway. He’s accompanied by a creepy, silent henchman (Ethan Suplee) who keeps watch on him in unsettling ways, while being pursued by a suspicious pickup truck that appears in all the places it shouldn’t.

There’s no need to further reveal the plot — credited to Blackhurst and David Ebeltoft, with a script by the latter — which has a few good twists but also feels predictable, especially in the last act. What makes Blood for Dust work is the sleek filmmaking, as well as McNairy’s sad and slippery portrayal of a down-and-out nobody who decides crime is the only thing that pays.

Blackhurst, who directed true crime documentaries on both Amanda Knox and John Wayne Gacy, has a keen eye for depicting the gloomy details of Cliff’s sad-sack life — the faceless motels he stays in while peddling medical supplies on the road or the people he can’t convince to help him out, including a cruel cattle auctioneer compellingly played by Stephen Dorff.

Collectively, these details paint a dour portrait of Western rural malaise — and, unlike the films of the Coens, one that contains no humor whatsoever. Harington does bring some levity to the proceedings early on, speaking with an accent so marked by rugged Americana it’s as if his character subsisted entirely on beef jerky. Soon enough, we realize that Ricky, with all his tough guy charms, is not necessarily going to give Cliff much of a hand, and things only spiral further from there.

Handsomely lensed by Justin Derry (Bruiser), who makes the frosted landscapes feel both monumental and lonesome, the independent feature makes the most of its modest budget, which was raised by a credit-block-busting 28 producers and executive producers. Such is what it takes to finance these kinds of small-scale genre pictures in the U.S. today, and while Blood for Dust doesn’t break any new ground in its domain, it should give the talented Blackhurst enough mileage to keep on making them.