Rock Candy

Mr. Nichols and his cinematographer, Adam Stone — the longtime second-unit photographer for the filmmaker David Gordon Green, who helped produce “Shotgun Stories” — often frame their tortured, self-destructive characters within wide shots of depopulated streets, verdant fields and placid bodies of water, acknowledging the beauty these men are too self-involved by rage to see.

The cast’s detailed but subtle performances deepen Mr. Nichols’s characters in ways that become clear only upon second viewing. Mr. Shannon’s constricted line readings and prematurely aged gait suggest the patriarchal burdens that Son bears without complaint. Mr. Ligon’s performance as the slobbish, amiable, easily flustered Boy is the film’s moral center. Shambling through the film’s final third, his bruised face squashed atop a neck brace, he’s a battered Everyman, torn between decency and hate.

The film opens today at the IFC Center in NYC. More national release dates after the jump.