There’s a great cast in Civil War, the new film written and directed by Alex Garland. They’re in there giving their all — Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jesse Plemons, and Nick Offerman — and sometimes achieving memorable effects in underwritten roles. I can still picture Dunst’s glinting, hard-eyed stare as a burnt-out photojournalist crossing the war-torn United States. I can hear Henderson’s rueful tone shift when he indicates he wants to join the little group of reporters on a “suicide mission” because he’s old and ailing and wants to die with his journalistic boots on. And Plemons deserves the rave reviews for his unnerving one-sequence performance as a thuggish militiaman wearing candy apple–red sunglasses and demanding of his terrified captives, “What kind of American are you?”

You’re supposed to name your state of birth, and it’s very unhealthy for you if you give the wrong answer. It’s the second American Civil War, see, which means secession, people fighting on behalf of their states or state-based alliances, roving bands of ultraviolent militia forces, and a lot of which-side-are-you-on confusion on the road.

The weak link in the cast, it seems to me, is Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla Presley in Priscilla) as the aspiring photojournalist in training Jessie Cullen, who hero-worships Dunst’s character, Lee Smith. Jessie’s supposed to be a college-aged young woman of unusual, even obsessive ambition and drive, but she looks about sixteen and not likely to be obsessed with anything more vital than the junior prom.