An intriguing teenage riff on Texas pulp noir that doesn’t quite reach the heights to which it aspires, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place is nevertheless a hardnosed, well-acted crime drama that effectively evokes locale and mood.

The film opens on Billy Joe (Logan Huffman) engineering a rip-off at his place of employment under cover of darkness. He uses the money to finance a big send-off in nearby Corpus Christi for his girlfriend Sue (Mackenzie Davis) and best friend Bobby (Jeremy Allen White), who are both off to college in a couple of weeks; in the grand tradition of noir, this is a very bad idea indeed. When they return to work at the cotton mill hung-over and broke, they are confronted by the sight of their furious boss Giff (Mark Pellegrino) beating the night watchman to within an inch of his life, convinced that the Mexican stole his money.  Bobby confesses that they were behind the theft, and in order to escape the fate that befalls the unfortunate watchman, the terrified boys and Sue agree to steal a much larger amount of money which is being laundered through the cotton-mill by Giff’s boss.

In a scene that introduces us to two of the leads and signposts the filmmakers’ intentions, Sue offers Bobby the loan of a book by revered pulp author Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters) while waiting for Billy Joe in a diner, urging Bobby to read it because Thompson wrote about dead-end Texas towns like the one they are about to escape. The film is an homage to Thompson, reimagining his pitch-black tales of doomed protagonists and monstrous psychopaths with teenage heroes in the manner of the superb Brick, which starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as teenage Dashiell Hammett-style detective in contemporary Southern California.

As in many of Thompson’s plots, an ill-advised action initiates a series of events which will end with horrific consequences, a fate from which the protagonists cannot escape. The film has its Thompson style villain in Giff, a wise-cracking sadist a la The Killer Inside Me’s Sheriff Lou Ford, whose outbursts of brutality and droll bon mots are delivered with enjoyably nasty aplomb. The three young leads create believable characters caught up in a hellish bind, often a challenge in the midst of such a hardboiled story. Relative unknown Logan Huffman, who displays a brooding intensity not unlike Josh Brolin’s, has the flashiest part of the three as the handsome ‘good ole boy’ Billy Joe, whose charmingly immature exterior hides a very dark nature.

In the end, the film loses the courage of its convictions by pulling back from a full-on, Thompson-esque finale, but that disappointment aside this bleak tale of small-town Texas immorality and betrayal would likely make the ‘Dimestore Dostoyevsky’ who inspired it tip his hat in appreciation.

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