Written and directed by Andrew Dominik (Chopper), this film will divide audiences: some will think it’s one of the most brilliant modern westerns ever made; others will be bored out of their mind. I confess that I thought I was set to join the bored brigade. I’ll take a western with a fast gun, a pretty floozy and a faithful horse any day. Yet I was won over by Dominik’s film, despite the absence of guns and girls and battles between good and evil. It’s rare to find a western as beautiful, bold and ambitious as this one. Dominik and his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, have taken the overfamiliar landscape of the west and given it back its poetry and mythical stature.

Dominik begins the story of Jesse James (Brad Pitt) in 1881, towards the end of his 14-year career in crime. He’s spending his days in a rocking chair, smoking a cigar, a stranger to his wife, his children and himself. His gang is losing traction, and he’s planning one last train robbery. Into his life comes 19-year-old Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), who wants to be his sidekick. He has worshipped James since he was a kid, reading stories about the celebrated outlaw. Ford is the ultimate fan – part convert, part crazy, part creep – and believes he’s destined for greatness. At one point, Ford sneaks up on James while he’s in the bath, and the legend asks him: “Do you want to be like me or just be me?” It’s the first western I’ve seen that evokes All About Eve.

This is a Jesse James tailor-made for our celebrity-mad age. He is stalked not by the law, but by his loopy fan. It’s the portrait of a legend in decline, and much is revealed about James’s state of mind by the fact that he surrounds himself with losers and sycophants such as Ford. Most modern westerns like to show the real human being behind the legend, but Dominik’s film suggests that, stripped of the legend, there wasn’t really that much left. (What we come to see is that a notorious outlaw is really a thug with a good publicist.) His James is a state of mind: violent, paranoid, delusional and cruel.

What provides the dramatic backbone is the film’s concern not so much with celebrity, but with loyalty. It asks: can anyone be trusted? We get little in the way of robberies and killings; this is a psychological western that takes the form of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between James and everyone who was once in his gang. Who will kill whom is the central and gripping question.

What makes it all work is the dramatic tension between Pitt’s James and Affleck’s Ford, and the nerve-wracking wait for the assassination to take place. Pitt gives his best performance since Fight Club: he is the magnificent, moody and mercurial king of a fading court, one who feels disgust at the creature he has become. He is a young Lear and a fat Elvis. Ford, brilliantly portrayed by Affleck, is the simpering nobody, a worm who turns and dares to dream about bringing the great man down, so he might, in his turn, become a somebody. He does – and, in turn, pays the price of fame, just like James.

15, 160 mins

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