The Order is a serious drama, and here we should pause to pay tribute to the fact that a serious drama is playing at the local multiplex where such films are rarely seen these days. It’s getting glowing reviews, in part for that reason. Though the crowds in theater lobbies are still there mostly just for Wicked, Moana 2, and Gladiator II.             

Based on the 1989 nonfiction book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order charts the FBI’s pursuit of the neo-Nazi group based in the Pacific Northwest and actively working in 1983 and 1984 toward an armed revolt against the US government, partly inspired by the novel The Turner Diaries by white nationalist William Luther Pierce. The impressively mustached and beefed-up Jude Law plays transplanted middle-aged agent Terry Husk, who’s so hard-driven in his pursuit of mobsters and Ku Klux Klan leaders, his idea of “taking it slow” is relocating to the Pacific Northwest to hunt rural white supremacists. He’s got the estranged family, the heart surgery scar, and the smoking and drinking habits of an almost-deranged true believer who’ll never be able to quit till he dies on the job.

Unfortunately, his methods are so macho and uncompromising, he tends to be a danger to himself and others, particularly those he works with. This doesn’t bode well for mild-mannered local cop Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) or scrappy fellow agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett).

Their quarry is the charismatic young leader of the Order, the elusive Robert Jay “Bob” Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), who seems at first to be Husk’s opposite. A clear-eyed, healthy-looking outdoorsman and family guy, Matthews is insidiously creepy and controlled, able to impose order on the chaos of erratic, disaffected young men who think it’s a fine idea to celebrate a successful robbery by burning a giant cross at their compound. He’s drawing his followers from the congregation of the local white nationalist preacher, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak). Mathews asserts that he’s absorbed Butler’s teachings and is putting them into practice at last, leading a series of daring and lucrative daylight bank and armored car robberies, using explosions in porn shops and movie houses as diversions to draw the cops away.

The Order is an interesting film with some effectively tense sequences and good performances overall. But the pace sometimes drags, and the spikier aspects of the film that seem more ambitious are always smoothed over again, leaving us with “good guys vs. bad guys” narrative logic. Though it’s heartening that the film at least recognizes the disturbing fanaticism of FBI agents. A perceptive white supremacist character in The Order notes after describing his community’s obsessive set of beliefs, “You would understand this, Agent, being in a cult — the FBI.”

As part of his research for the lead role, Law contacted FBI agents who were active in the 1980s, noting all cited a fiery obsession: “They wanted to serve their country, or they really believed in the Bureau and the process of the Bureau, or they just wanted, and this is verbatim, they would say, ‘I just wanted to catch bad guys.’”

Unfortunately, what it meant to “believe in the Bureau” is left quite vague in the film. It certainly once meant, for example, being steeped in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s viciously right-wing ideology and the accompanying abuses of power. There are no such specifics in The Order, which is a shame, because it was a great opportunity to explore the various strains of hatred circulating briskly through the American system. These strains often lead to lethal face-offs between people and groups who share a surprising number of values, attitudes, and beliefs. But at least Law evokes some sort of critical sensibility through the alarming physicality of his performance. He brings the sweaty, unwholesome energy of fanaticism and corruption by drawing on such performances as Gene Hackman’s brutal cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection (1971).

The film starts with a broadcast by Alan Berg (Marc Maron), the Jewish radio host who was assassinated by the Order in 1984, an infamous event dramatized in this film as well as in Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio (1988). Berg, who had a famously combative style that made him one of the early stars of what became the increasingly noxious popular phenomenon of “talk radio,” is shown taking calls from rabid white supremacists trying to school him on their vision of the Jewish-run world order. Berg argues scornfully that people like them just can’t face up to the fact that they’re all too inept to make a go of it in modern society.

The claustrophobic sense of being trapped in cycles of hatred, contempt, and dismissal is fostered by the look of the film overall. It’s drab and miasmic, as if the atmosphere were poisoned by the sick scapegoating rage directed at Jews, immigrants, and people of color by so many locals, and by the dismissive assumptions of urban liberal types who assume the rural white working class are all “a basket of deplorables.”

“We weren’t all born under a white sheet,” one aggrieved local woman tells Husk.

It’s not until Husk heads out into nature to clear his head that the look of the film brightens to reveal the beauty of the awesome forested landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Two different times, the same majestic elk steps into view, and Husk automatically hauls out his gun to shoot it. The second time he hesitates, and we’re left to interpret his hesitation. Is he wondering if it’s possible to be a man and not shoot something?

It’s an awkwardly self-conscious symbolic choice on the part of screenwriter Zach Baylin (Bob Marley: One Love, King Richard) and director Justin Kurzel (Nitram, The True History of the Kelly Gang), on a par with naming the protagonist “Husk” to further emphasize how hollowed out he is by his obsessive pursuit of “bad guys.”

But this too-narrow view of the “bad guys” is what we’re left with in the end, with solemn white-lettered sentences on black concluding the film by connecting the terrorism of the Order to more other recent attacks inspired by The Turner Diaries. They include the Oklahoma City bombing carried out in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh, who reputedly slept with The Turner Diaries under his pillow, and the January 6 insurrection in 2021, with the gallows erected in front of the Capitol building in reference to the “day of the rope” illustration in The Turner Diaries.

And though we’re right to shiver over the rise, and rise again, of neo-Nazism, surely that shouldn’t be the concluding point of this movie or any exchange of political observations. What’s fostering the rise? What makes America so fascist-friendly?

As usual, there are many urgent questions that never get posed, much less answered, in “serious dramas” dealing with politics in America.